Grimanesa Amorós

Early life and career Grimanesa Amorós was born in Lima, Peru, in 1962. Her father was a civil engineer and her mother was creatively inclined; Amorós has said both parents influenced her later artistic practice. As a child she became fascinated with maps, and her mother enrolled her in painting classes at around the age of 11. Alongside her light installations, she has worked in painting, video, and sculpture.

Notable installations Amorós's light-based installations frequently address cultural identity, urban landscapes, and the relationship between technology and human experience. Her work typically incorporates LED lights, diffusion materials, and programmed lighting sequences tailored to each site.

In 2011, Amorós created Uros House as a site-specific installation for the Times Square Alliance's Public Art Program in New York City, presented during Armory Arts Week in conjunction with The Armory Show. Installed at Duffy Square and the Broadway plazas between 46th and 47th Streets, the work appeared alongside pieces by artists including Tom Otterness and Niki de Saint Phalle. The piece used light-diffusing materials and animated lighting inspired by the reed housing structures of the Uros people of Lake Titicaca.

Pink Lotus, unveiled in 2015, was a public art installation commissioned for The Peninsula New York as part of the hotel's "Art of Pink" initiative supporting Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It was inspired by the lotus flower, which symbolizes purity and rebirth in many cultures.

That same year, Golden Waters was installed above the Arizona Canal in Scottsdale, Arizona, sponsored by Scottsdale Public Art. Inspired by the irrigation systems of the Hohokam people, the piece consisted of illuminated tubing suspended above the water and was positioned near architect Paolo Soleri's Soleri Bridge.

In 2019, Amorós created Mariposa Dorada for the 13th Havana Biennial, a monumental light sculpture installed on a building façade along Havana's Malecón as part of the biennial's Detrás del Muro program and inspired by Cuba's national flower.

In 2021, she completed Golden Array, a large-scale installation commissioned by the Reliance Group and Maker Maxity for the Bandra Kurla Complex (Jio World Drive) in Mumbai, India. Measuring roughly 210 by 70 feet, the work was inspired by the tangle of cable lines Amorós observed across the Mumbai skyline and used gold- and white-lit cables in a cascading form. The work was commissioned for the arts program of the inaugural Wellbeing Summit for Social Change, curated by Manuel Bagorro with Vicente Todolí as artistic advisor, which commissioned international artists including Mirosław Bałka, Janet Cardiff and Carlos Garaicoa.

In 2022, Amorós presented Amplexus at Noor Riyadh, a citywide light and art festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Writing in Galerie, Jill Sieracki described the clock tower as glowing from within "a tight tangle of cherry-red light".

Light installation RADIANCE in the Walt Disney Concert Hall, by Grimanesa Amoros.

In January 2026, Amorós created a site-specific light installation, Radiance, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall, presented in conjunction with performances of Alexander Scriabin's Prometheus: Poem of Fire, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and featuring pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Reviewing the premiere in The New York Times, Joshua Barone described the installation as hanging in front of the hall's organ, with tendrils around the console's opening that "draped and curled like plants at the mouth of a cave."

Exhibitions In 2011, Amorós's Uros Island was shown in the Future Pass collateral exhibition at the 54th Venice Biennale, a survey of Asian and international artists curated by Victoria Lu, Renzo di Renzo and Felix Schöber. A continuation of her Uros series, the installation filled the gallery with illuminated polycarbonate domes of varying sizes, silkscreened with imagery of totora reeds, whose appearance shifted as daylight through the gallery's window changed; the exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by curator Jane Farver and a video work, Miranda, scored by Ivri Lider.

In June 2013, Amorós created The Mirror Connection, a site-specific installation for the main lobby of the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, designed by Arata Isozaki. Later that year she presented Fortuna, a light installation commissioned by Spain's Ministry of Culture for the La Fragua hall of the Tabacalera in Madrid, a former royal tobacco factory, the work taking its name from a cigarette brand once produced there.

In 2016, Amorós presented Ocupante, a solo exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, comprising the large-scale light installations Ocupante and Golden Secret Room together with video work. In her catalogue essay, Reifenscheid characterized light in Amorós's practice as "space, movement, time," likening the movement of the installation's LED tubes across the room to breathing.

Critical reception

Commentators have frequently connected Amorós's light installations to Peruvian cultural memory and to the perceptual and communal effects of light.

In her essay for the Light Between the Islands exhibition catalogue, the curator Jane Farver, a former director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, read Amorós's LED works through Peruvian sources, linking them to the sea foam of the Pacific coast and the floating Uros islands of Lake Titicaca.

In essays for the exhibition catalogue Between Heaven and Earth (Hostos Center for the Arts, CUNY, 2006), the art critic Marek Bartelik and the art historian Susan Aberth discussed the installation of the same name, in essays titled "A Journey Between Heaven and Earth" and "A Moment of Sanctuary," respectively.

Reviewing the Ocupante exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, the museum's director characterized light in Amorós's practice as "space, movement, time." Judith K. Brodsky discussed Amorós among feminist artists working in public art, describing Hedera (2018) as covering the Prospect Park band shell in loops of lighted tubing emulating climbing vines, and linking Golden Waters (2015) to both the irrigation canals of the Hohokam and Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti. The architecture theorist argued that Golden Waters made Soleri's pedestrian bridge and the canal beneath it into gathering elements, and that installations of this kind counter urban neglect by encouraging public participation.

Amorós's work has also drawn independent press coverage. Writing in Hyperallergic, the critic Alexander Cavaluzzo described her Uros installation at the Tribeca Issey Miyake store as setting her luminous "bubble" sculptures in tension with the boutique's architecture.

Collaborations

In 2006, Amorós collaborated with Grammy-winning José Luis Pardo of Los Amigos Invisibles on the score for Reflexión Obscura. In her video Rootless Algas, she worked with composer Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, who wrote an original score.

In 2013, Amorós collaborated with Ivri Lider of The Young Professionals on the soundtrack for her video Miranda, shown as part of her Light Between the Islands exhibition. She created the lighting sculpture Timeless Motion (In Life and Light) for a jewelry presentation at the Biennale des Antiquaires at the Grand Palais in Paris, France.

In 2022, Amorós collaborated with actor and musician Maya Hawke on a cover story for As If Magazine (Issue 21), photographed by editor-in-chief Tatijana Shoan, creating a light-based installation as the backdrop for the shoot.

Awards and grants Choose Creativity Awards (2023) New York City Public Design Commission 41st Annual Awards for Excellence in Design (2023) Culture Summit Artists-in Residence Award (2018) Bronx Museum of the Arts: AIM Alumni Artist Award (2017) ARTspace Summer Artist-in-Residence (2004) Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship Residency (2002) Bronx Museum of the Arts: AIM Program (1990)