Lightwave

The installation »Lightwave« by Olafur Eliasson consists of eighty dimmable fluorescent tubes that are mounted in parallel above the heads of the visitors. The tubes light up one after the other, creating a wave of light over a distance of 12.5 metres.

Fluorescent tubes came onto the market in 1938 and were first used as an artistic medium in the early 1960s by artists such as Dan Flavin and François Morellet. Since the mid-1990s, Olafur Eliasson has been investigating phenomena of natural and artificial light, drawing on insights from physics and the psychology of perception. For his installations, he creates an interplay between the light source and the environment it illuminates – in the »Lightwave« installation, visitors can walk through the newly created space accompanied by the light.