Light Sculpture

Light Sculpture

Light art is a form of visual art where main media of expression is light. Light has been used for architectural aesthetical effects throughout human history. However, the modern concept of light art emerged with the development of artificial light sources and experimenting in modern art.

Art critic Hilarie M. Sheets explains that "the interplay of dark and light has been a theme running from Greek and Roman sculpture to Renaissance painting to experimental film. But as technology advanced from the glow of the electric lightbulb to the computer monitor, artists have been experimenting with actual light as material and subject. The 1960s saw a high point in activity, with artists such as Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, and James Turrell creating sculptures and environments out of diffuse light or radiant fluorescent and neon tubing.

Today, younger artists are looking beyond their forerunners and taking light in new directions." One of the first to use this technique was László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) Examples of light art include works by Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Gerhard von Graevenitz, Chul Hyun Ahn, Dan Flavin, Olafur Eliasson, James Turrell, Waltraut Cooper, Bruce Munro, Aleksandra Stratimirovič, Austine Wood Comarow, Tim White-Sobieski and many others.

Read more about Light Sculpture:  History, Examples, Curators, The Neons Parallax Project, Artists in Light, See Also, Gallery

Famous quotes containing the words light and/or sculpture:

    Think what a mean and wretched place this world is; that half the time we have to light a lamp that we may see to live in it. This is half our life. Who would undertake the enterprise if it were all?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you.
    Anna C. Brackett (1836–1911)