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Sphere of spheres
Olafur Eliasson
Artwork 2014
Artwork: Olafur Eliasson, Sphere of spheres (2014). Partially silvered crystal spheres, stainless steel. 90 cm diameter. Private collection.
Artist Olafur Eliasson Title Sphere of spheres Date 2014 Materials Partially silvered crystal spheres, stainless steel Dimensions 90 cm diameter Edition Edition of 3 Credit Private collection

Sphere of spheres appears as a constellation of dewdrops seen up close. The viewer, catching their reflection in the mirrored balls, finds themselves small and upside-down, and multiplied across the many droplets. Reduced in size and silent, the viewer’s many images appear caught in their respective spheres. “There is no outside,” the work’s description reads in sentences left free-floating and unconnected – “looking at, looking through,” “small spatial experiments,” “you only see things when you move.” The crystal sphere, half-silvered to create a mirror-like surface on the far side from the viewer, is a recurring optical motif in many of Eliasson’s works, a simple yet lasting expression of light’s complexity.

b.1967, Copenhagen

Olafur Eliasson is at once an artist, ecologist, architect, inventor and splitter of light. Among his more ambitious gestures, he has made rainbows appear in galleries, turned rivers green, built waterfalls in Manhattan, set glaciers melting in public squares, and conjured the sun in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Immersive and experiential, Eliasson’s many projects offer an embodied engagement with the natural world. While his preoccupations are primarily environmental, they extend to include more abstract pursuits, such as colour theory, complex geometry, and motion patterns. Engaged with the mechanics of perception, Eliasson explores how and why we see things, rather than what we see. As such, many of his smaller, more discrete works appear as optical experiments; the ordinary qualities of light lent a sculptural expression. In making visible the physics of perception, Eliasson inspires a pre-intellectual wonder in the visual world, whether it be in the simplest refraction of light or the interplay of colours. The artist, curator Laurence Dreyfus writes, “confronts the finitude of the human being with the idea of a vast, expansive universe,” and, in doing so, invites us to see with new attention those phenomena which describe our visual world.

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