By Payal Uttam

Before a theater performance even begins, lighting has already shaped the audience’s emotional response. The same is true when stepping into a gallery or museum. ‘But the lighting works almost on an unconscious level, so people hardly realize it,’ says Tobias Jakob Spohr, head of lighting design, ERCO Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. ‘When they enter an exhibition, they may say, “What beautiful architecture, what a beautiful atmosphere.” But usually it’s the effect of the lighting.’

In recent years, lighting has taken on a more central role in the art world. No longer merely a technical necessity, it is now used as a curatorial tool, helping frame exhibition narratives and influencing how viewers perceive works. A growing number of art fairs, auction houses, museums, galleries, and even private collectors are working with lighting designers to create more nuanced viewing conditions.

At Art Basel this June, visitors may begin to notice how profoundly lighting impacts the experience of looking at art. Across fairs, galleries, and museums internationally – including Art Basel – many of these environments are developed in collaboration with ERCO, an international specialist for lighting solutions.

For decades, the art world relied on halogen bulbs and fluorescent tubes. However, the development of blue LED in the 1990s has made high-quality white light possible. ‘It’s like when you wear glasses and can suddenly see clearly,’ says Spohr, ‘because the high-quality LEDs in combination with precise lens systems render more nuances in surface textures and colors.’ Advances in technology have also made it easier. Previously, adjusting lighting between exhibitions required technicians to replace fixtures and reprogram systems, but now gallery staff can control brightness and color using a smartphone or tablet.

When Brussels-based gallery Xavier Hufkens added a minimalist extension to its historic townhouse space, ERCO installed flexible track spotlights with a Bluetooth-controlled system. They opted for interchangeable lenses, allowing curators to shift between wide and narrow beams depending on the exhibition.

For Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s exhibition of vibrantly hued paintings and pastel works at the gallery, Spohr says selecting lights with a high Color Rendering Index (CRI) was essential to ensuring that the saturated pinks, greens, and blues in the canvases looked more luminous and vivid. ‘As a rule, the CRI values should always be 90 or above, otherwise the works risk appearing dull,’ he says.

Each of the rooms of the gallery was painted a different color, requiring its own lighting approach. For the pale pink top floor, Party wanted the space to feel airy, so the gallery adopted wall washing, where light is distributed evenly across a surface to create a soft, uniform glow. The effect is a softer, more atmospheric sense of brightness. Meanwhile, the walls on the entrance level floor were painted a rich green. As darker colors absorb more light, the gallery combined wallwashing with spotlighting, creating stronger contrast and more focused attention on each artwork. 

It is also important to consider the color temperature of the lighting. At London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery, ERCO collaborated on the exhibition ‘Rembrandt’s Light’. Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky developed a tailored concept using a wireless Bluetooth-controlled ERCO LED system. Warm lighting is a typical choice for Old Master works, which tend to be darker, as it can accentuate the chiaroscuro of the paintings. Meanwhile, at the recently inaugurated Fenix Museum in Rotterdam, more neutral, cooler-toned spotlights were used to illuminate a body of black-and-white photographs from ‘The Family of Migrants’ exhibition. ‘This makes the contrast more intense,’ explains Spohr. ‘Warm light would make the white areas of the photographs appear yellowish.’

Lighting design can also influence the way we move through space and create a sense of rhythm in an exhibition. As a result, curators at galleries and museums are harnessing lighting to tell a story. ‘Light can guide you as an observer. You are always triggered to move to the brightest spot, so it can shape where your attention goes,’ says Spohr. ‘If everything is completely the same, you don’t have an orientation, and the artwork has no emphasis.’

If a curator wants viewers to focus on a significant work, or foreground the texture and material of a piece, they may use high-contrast grazing light – where fixtures are positioned close to a wall or surface at a sharp angle – which creates small shadows that reveal detail, making surfaces appear more dimensional. 

Even simple spotlighting can dramatically alter the emotional register of a room. ‘When every work is individually accentuated, moving through the exhibition begins to feel like a sequence of discoveries,’ Spohr explains.

At Axel Vervoordt Gallery’s headquarters in Belgium – a historic distillery with multiple buildings – some of the rooms have almost black walls and little ambient light. In these cases, dimmable accent lighting creates a contemplative, almost monastic mood, inviting viewers to concentrate on the artworks. One example is a darkened space in which a meditating Buddhist ‘Lohan’ disciple made of varnished wood is displayed with a single spotlight. The precise angle and distribution of the spotlight reveal the texture and detail of the ancient sculpture.

It’s not just art institutions that recognize the added value of light and invest in high-quality solutions: Private individuals are increasingly working with lighting designers too. Berlin-based collector Gunnar Schnabel, for instance, enlisted ERCO for his sprawling six-story loft-like home. Wallwashing illuminated several monumental 1980s Neue Wilde paintings, while spotlights above the dining and sofa areas helped define the living zones around them.

As lighting technologies continue to evolve, designers are finding new ways to deepen the viewing experience. Some institutions are exploring circadian rhythm lighting, which mimics natural daylight cycles and is thought to support wellbeing. This shift is made possible by advances in tunable white systems, which allow color temperature to change fluidly within a single installation. In a museum with a glass atrium, cooler light can complement the daytime sky and create a sense of alertness, before gradually transitioning to more soothing, warmer tones in the evening – without the shift being perceptible to visitors.

Ultimately, Spohr says lighting is ‘another layer of interpretation’ placed onto an artwork. Just as musicians reinterpret a Bach composition centuries later through different instruments and performances, artworks are continually recontextualized through light. ‘It’s creative work. You need a concept and an argument,’ says Spohr. ‘And the result shapes everything.’