Olafur Eliasson's Beauty And Your Sun Machine

Olafur Eliasson is an Icelandic installation artist who works with light and the spaces in which his installations reside. In 1967, he was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and raised in Iceland. The desolate northern landscape of his childhood had developed his artistic sensibilities and style, giving him a keen appreciation for the changing drama of natural light. He began his career selling lamps, called Little Suns, to poor people who had little access to electricity in Africa. Eliasson wanted people to consider where electricity came from and to feel connected to other lamp owners. He brings about the idea that while business and finance is losing the trust of people, artists are retaining it. This is how he came to incorporating consumer durables into incredibly successful pieces of art. Not only is Eliasson highly interested in light, he is also often asphyxiated with spheres. Spheres, to him, are models for planets; he likes to use this to draw viewers attention to the acknowledgment that human activity has a large role in the ecological and atmospheric systems of the earth. He wants to remind people that we are inseparable from earth.
This work by Olafur Eliasson is titled Beauty. It was created in 1993 and has been exhibited in multiple …show more content…
This installation had been created by Eliasson cutting an opening, or an aperture, directly into the ceiling of the gallery. This aperture had allowed for the sunlight to come into the room and travel from one side of the room to the other, as the sun rose and fell from the horizon throughout the day. Many people have claimed that if you looked long and hard enough at the patch of light, that you could actually witness the sun moving. This observation of the sun and the movement of its light in relation to our position on earth, caused the viewers to begin to think of their connection to the earth and its endless journey around the