Why Do Artists Keep Building Chapels?
- Diamond Zhou
- Jul 25
- 10 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
Juy 25th, 2026
By Diamond Zhou
Written with time, thought, and a human pulse.
For most of Western art history, art and the chapel had a straightforward relationship. A sacred space came first, and artists were commissioned to fill it, from frescoes, altarpieces, to sculpture, mosaics, stained glass and devotional objects, they entered an architectural and religious space larger than individual work. Giotto did not devise the Scrovegni Chapel as an extension of his artistic practice, nor did Michelangelo create the Sistine Chapel in order to house his paintings. No matter how creatively or completely those artists came to define their spaces, the chapel preceded and thus confined them.
By the twentieth century, that relationship shifted. Artists were no longer simply making works for chapels, instead increasingly, they conceived the chapel itself. Architecture, furniture, windows, walls, colour, landscape and light all became elements of a single artistic environment. Some of these chapels remained consecrated places of worship. Others became interfaith spaces, secular places of contemplation, or works of art that borrowed the architecture and behaviour of the chapel without adopting its religious function.
Spirituality is part of the attraction, but the chapel offers more than an opportunity to address faith. It carries centuries of learned behaviour. A person entering a chapel instinctively slows down, voices become quieter, sitting and waiting feel appropriate, appreciating a sense of stillness. Unlike the neutrality conventionally claimed by a white-cube gallery, the chapel tells us in advance that the room and what it contains deserve a particular quality of attention. An artist working with a place of worship inherits not only the structure of an architecture but a ritual of looking.
Henri Matisse's Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, completed in 1951 for a community of Dominican sisters, marks one of the clearest moments when an artist's role expanded from making objects for a sacred space to conceiving the entire experience of the space. Matisse had met Monique Bourgeois when she cared for him as a young nurse during a period of illness. She later entered the Dominican order as Sister Jacques-Marie, and conversations about decorating an existing oratory became plans for an entirely new chapel. Between 1948 and 1951, Matisse worked on the building, its stained glass, ceramic murals, stalls, holy-water fonts, liturgical objects and priestly vestments. The city of Vence describes it as the first time a painter had conceived a monument in its entirety, from architecture to furnishings and glass, Matisse regarded it as the culmination of his working life.
The interior is strikingly spare. White walls, floors and ceramic surfaces establish a field against which Matisse's black linear drawings and stained glass appear with extraordinary clarity. The windows use largely yellow, green and blue: sunlight, vegetation, Mediterranean sky. Rather than remain within the boundaries of the glass, colour enters the chapel and moves across the pale surfaces as the position and intensity of the sun change. Saint Dominic, the Virgin and Child and the Stations of the Cross remain fixed on their ceramic walls while coloured reflections alter the space around them.
The division between artwork and surroundings becomes unstable. The window produces an image, but so does the temporary blue or yellow shape projected onto the floor. The wall carries a drawing but also receives the changing light. While religious architecture had utilised the expressive possibilities of light for centuries. Medieval stained glass transformed ordinary sunlight into coloured illumination that seemed to belong simultaneously to the physical world and to something beyond it. Matisse stripped away much of the narrative complexity traditionally carried by such windows while preserving their capacity to transform the room itself.
The Rothko Chapel in Houston, commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil and dedicated in 1971, moves much further from traditional religious imagery. Fourteen paintings by Rothko surround the visitor: seven canvases with hard-edged black forms on maroon grounds, and seven dark purple tonal paintings, all completed in 1967. The chapel is non-denominational and describes itself not only as a spiritual space but as a place for solitude, gathering, civil rights and human-rights activity. Its visitor policies still explicitly request silence and contemplation.
Nothing in Rothko's paintings offers the familiar structure of older devotional art. At first the paintings may seem almost impenetrably dark. With time, black separates from maroon, purple shifts in intensity, edges appear and disappear, and apparently uniform surfaces begin to acquire depth.
Rothko removes the religious narrative but retains the temporal conditions that made contemplation possible. The visitor is not instructed what to think about or what to believe; instead, the room isolates an encounter and allows it to unfold slowly. The chapel's parallel commitment to human rights also prevents contemplation from becoming merely private. Its history joins inward reflection to outward engagement with political and ethical questions.
Swiss artist Not Vital’s Bataan Chapel, in Bagac in the Philippines, pushes the idea of pilgrimage into the landscape itself. Set on a remote hill and reached through difficult terrain, the journey becomes part of the experience. Its stark concrete form sits somewhere between sculpture and architecture, with carefully placed openings allowing natural light to cut into the otherwise enclosed interior. Rather than separating the chapel from its surroundings, Vital makes distance, effort and isolation part of the work, so that arrival carries its own sense of preparation.
Louise Nevelson's Chapel of the Good Shepherd, completed in 1977 for Saint Peter's Church in Manhattan, brings the idea of a total environment into one of the most emphatically secular landscapes imaginable. The chapel sits within the base of what was then Citicorp Center, surrounded by the commercial architecture of Midtown Manhattan. Nevelson created an integrated sculptural environment in white and gold, and it remains the only comprehensive Nevelson environment preserved in its original permanent setting.
The relationship between the small interior and the enormous corporate complex around it is part of the work's charm. Outside are the regular heartbeat of the city with offices and traffic, while inside, the chapel was conceived as a human-scaled place of quiet within the modern city. The threshold between the two environments requires only a few steps, yet the expectations governing each are almost opposite.
Ellsworth Kelly's Austin, completed posthumously and opened at the Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas Austin in 2018, pushes the chapel form further into secular territory. Kelly designed the 2,715-square-foot stone building as a unified work comprising architecture, three arrangements of coloured glass, fourteen black-and-white marble panels and an eighteen-foot redwood sculpture. It was the only building he ever designed. Kelly imagined it as a place of "calm and light," while the Blanton describes the changing sunlight passing through the coloured windows as making the apparently fixed structure a time-based work.
Austin does not function as a church, although its origins in Kelly's earlier studies for a chapel remain visible. Its vaulted interior, axial organisation and coloured glass carry associations accumulated through centuries of sacred architecture. Yet no doctrine governs the room, and no act of worship is required.
Kelly separates the chapel's contemplative behaviour from formal religion without emptying the architecture of meaning. The coloured glass changes continuously with weather and time of day, temporarily painting walls and floors with shapes that exist only as long as particular conditions of light permit them. The visitor occupies a work that cannot be experienced fully from a single position or at a single moment.
Ettore Spalletti's Cappella di Villa Serena, made with architect Patrizia Leonelli on the grounds of a private hospital near Pescara, brings painting, architecture and worship even closer together. Blue, a colour central to Spalletti's practice, moves across walls and architectural planes in varying intensities. He described the church as a place in which a person could pray or simply sit silently, adding that such a contemplative condition was "exactly what one seeks in a picture."
We often call a painting contemplative because it seems to produce an experience associated with silence or sacred space. Spalletti approaches the chapel as an enlargement of something already latent within painting: the possibility that sustained looking alters perception.
The Sister Chapel, conceived by Ilise Greenstein in 1974 and first exhibited at P.S.1 in 1978, takes its name from an explicit play on the Sistine Chapel. Greenstein imagined a secular, non-hierarchical alternative to the male-dominated historical narrative she associated with Michelangelo's famous ceiling. Twelve other women participated, producing monumental standing female figures that together form an all-female pantheon of historical women, contemporary figures, deities and conceptual identities.
Greenstein's enormous abstract ceiling contains a mirrored centre. A visitor looking upward finds their own reflection within the installation, interrupting the separation between the monumental figures and the people beneath them. At its current permanent installation at Rowan University, the paintings encircle the viewer while the ceiling occupies the space overhead.
The pun on Sistine is relevant and clever, Michelangelo's chapel carries authority not only because of the paintings themselves but because of their placement, scale and the centuries of reverence that surround them. Figures elevated above a viewer acquire a different status from pictures encountered at eye level in a gallery. The Sister Chapel takes that architecture of veneration and redistributes it. The question is no longer only what deserves to be represented, but who has historically been granted the monumental spaces through which cultural importance is produced.
Louise Bourgeois approached an existing seventeenth-century chapel at Le Couvent d'Ô in Bonnieux, France, through an entirely different relationship to religious symbolism. Beginning in 2001, she created works for the site including a marble baptismal font, a confessional, mother-and-child imagery and a bronze cross whose horizontal arms terminate in human hands. Bourgeois openly stated that she was not religious and described her concern instead as "real flesh and blood."
Christianity nevertheless provided Bourgeois with forms already saturated with psychological meaning. Confession implies secrecy, shame, disclosure and the possibility of forgiveness. The mother and child may belong to Christian iconography, but maternity, dependence and ambivalence had occupied her throughout her career. The cross can remain a religious object while also becoming an image of the vulnerable body. Bourgeois does not empty those symbols of their histories as she allows personal memory and bodily experience to inhabit them.
Religious architecture had spent centuries creating forms through which guilt, grief, birth, suffering, death and redemption could be given physical expression. The persistence of those experiences does not depend upon the persistence of religious belief. Bourgeois shifts the chapel's inherited language from theology towards psychology without severing the two completely.
James Turrell's permanent installation in the Dorotheenstädtischer Cemetery Chapel in Berlin was created as part of a renovation of the 1928 funeral chapel, the work fills the architecture with coloured light whose source remains largely concealed. Häusler Contemporary explicitly relates Turrell's intervention to Biblical ideas of light and to Gothic churches in which illumination seems to dissolve the weight of architecture.
The progression from stained glass to light as an independent artistic medium is striking. Turrell dispenses with the need for a representational image almost entirely. The room is not illuminated so that something else can be seen, because illumination itself is the experience.
Sacred architecture had long used light to suggest the immaterial through material means. Turrell retains that perceptual effect while leaving its interpretation open. The viewer may understand the experience spiritually, aesthetically or simply physiologically. The altered perception of colour and space occurs regardless.
Contemporary culture has no shortage of images. They arrive continually, frequently viewed for seconds before the next replaces them. Against that abundance, the chapel produces a different kind of scarcity: a temporary scarcity of distraction. Its architecture assumes that being present with a single experience for a sustained period of time has value.
Perhaps the chapel belongs to a much older family of spaces than the museum: the cave, the tomb, the observatory, the theatre, even the darkroom — places designed to separate us temporarily from ordinary conditions so that something otherwise difficult to perceive can come alive. Each one controls what enters: light, sound, movement, other people, the outside world. In that sense, the artist chapel is less a container for sacred objects than an architecture of deliberate deprivation. Its apparent uselessness may now be part of its absolute charm and presence. In a culture in which attention is constantly solicited, measured and monetised, a room that asks nothing of us except that we remain there begins to feel almost oppositional. We may no longer agree about what deserves reverence, but we can continue to build places in which we can practise it.
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