James Turrell at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

James Turrell is an American artist who works with the refractory medium of light. He was born in 1943 and first came to prominence in the mid-1960s, as one of a generation of West Coast artists associated with what came to be known as the “California Light and Space Movement”. His creations are commonly described as sculptures, but the term is misleading because it implies an ambition to turn things seen or imagined into permanent, three-dimensional objects. Turrell’s art is dematerialised and ungraspable, present to the eye but undetectable by the other senses. His devices are not those of the conventional sculptor, but of the theatrical metteur-en-scene and lighting designer. He is an arranger of carefully stage-managed experiences, creating tricks of the light to play on his audience’s sensibilities.

No fewer than three of the artist’s luminous intangibilities are currently on display in the recently completed gallery of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park – an elegant, rectangular structure of steel and glass that has been ingeniously roofed with a lawn, to help it blend into the surrounding landscape of hill and dale. Each work of art occupies a purpose-built, blacked-out room that has been specially constructed within the gallery. As a result, the entire space has been turned into a kind of corridor or enfilade, giving access to three chambers much as the corridors of a monastery might open on to individual monks’ cells, or as the aisle of a church might be punctuated by a succession of altars. The allusion to monastic or other forms of religious experience is, in the circumstances, apt. Turrell was brought up a Quaker and he is among other things a maker of secular shrines, conjuring effects from a material long associated with revelation. His creations resemble literal re-enactments of John, I, v: “And the...