Light—its myriad sources and manifestations—has been a perennial source of inspiration for artists over centuries regardless of time or place, medium, or genre. While light and its representation are a keystone of art history, it is no less prevalent amongst contemporary artists, which was the core focus of the exhibition “Make Me See” at Amsterdam-based Enari Gallery.

Installation view of “Make Me See” (2024-25). Photo: Jonathan de Waart. Courtesy of Enari Gallery, Amsterdam.

Here, the gallery brought together six working artists—Dabin Ahn, Emma Beatrez, Fiona Finnegan, Lisa Liljeström, Lindsay Merrill, and Dimitris Tampakis—whose works together offered a novel dialogue around the creative potential of light. Tapping light as a compositional element, these artists explore the emotional, narrative, and even psychological capacity of light; each artists’ contribution illuminated a unique facet of light and the ways it may be artistically deployed. Not simply an empirical, representational component of the composition, “Make Me See” interrogated light as a conduit for storytelling.

Emma Beatrez, Liftoff (2024). Photo: Jonathan de Waart. Courtesy of Enari Gallery, Amsterdam.

The artists’ varied works in the show touch on the dynamism of light’s ability to convey narrative and emotional themes. In paintings by Lisa Liljeström, light reveals as much as it obscures. Much like overexposed film, each composition takes on an otherworldly cast and leaves the eye searching for detail. Bringing to the fore ideas around memory, loss, and perception, each work leaves the viewer questioning the boundaries between reality and recollection.

In Lindsay Merrill’s painting Light Giver (2024) and Fiona Finnegan’s All Hallow’s Eve (2024), light’s ability to create an emotional tone and narrative take center stage. Light within these compositions creates an eerie, uncanny effect, alluding to a greater story just outside the image’s frame. Juxtaposing this, however, is Finnegan’s Black Moon (2024), which employs the tradition of landscape painting, leaning into the ways light and color can inform one another to make what is otherwise recognizable into something unique and ethereal.

Fiona Finnegan, Black moon (2024). Photo: Jonathan de Waart. Courtesy of Enari Gallery, Amsterdam.

Dimitris Tampakis’s practice takes a distinctive and novel approach to light, rendering it something akin to an artifact wherein details and greater context are meant to be visually mined. Regardless of approach or method, light stands as a cornerstone feature across each artists’ work in “Make Me See,” which together speaks to the prevailing importance of not only of light in contemporary art, but the continuing artistic innovations and explorations that are occurring around its uses.

“Make Me See” is on view at Enari Gallery, Amsterdam