Who would have thought a roomful of balloons would be so popular?

The Nasher Sculpture Center has extended the “Sightings: Martin Creed” exhibition until Aug. 21. It was originally scheduled to close June 19.

The highlight of the Nasher since March has been entering the balloon-filled gallery space downstairs and walking around in the static-y expanse. Each time I’ve been there, there’s always been a line of people ready to give it a try. If there is anything to be learned from the installation it’s that it doesn’t take much to turn adults back into kids again.

For a primer, check out Jerome’s post from when the exhibition opened.

Keep reading for the news release from the Nasher:

DALLAS, Texas (June 9, 2011) – The Nasher Sculpture Center is pleased to announce that the Sightings: Martin Creed exhibition featuring Work No. 1190: Half the air in a given space and other works will be extended through August 21, 2011. The exhibition was originally scheduled to close on June 19, 2011.

“The response for Sightings: Martin Creed has been extraordinary” said Nasher Sculpture Center director Jeremy Strick. “We are thrilled to be able to meet that response by extending the exhibition, making it available throughout the summer for our visitors to experience and enjoy.”

In the second exhibition of Sightings, the Nasher Sculpture Center’s new series of installations and interventions, Turner Prize-winning artist, Martin Creed transformed the Lower Level Gallery, filling the space with approximately 9,000 gold balloons to a height of about 8 feet. Related to several earlier installations, the balloons enclose and make visible portions of the volume of air in the room to drastically alter one’s physical experience of the space, as well as explore the relationship between sculpture and architecture. The exhibition also features a focused selection of recent work in the space outside the Lower Level Gallery, including sound sculptures on the stairs and elevator activated by the visitors.

Over the past two decades, Creed’s work – which has included painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, video, musical performance, and text – has consistently explored the emotional and existential impact of dichotomous physical states: presence versus absence, being versus nothingness, and doing versus not doing. In 2001, Creed won the prestigious Turner Prize, given to a British artist under 50 for an outstanding exhibition or installation in the previous year, for Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, an empty room in which the lights continuously alternated between being on and being off every five seconds. Often using the most straightforward, unassuming means, Creed’s work takes joy in simple experiences and questions our assumptions of what a work of art is and what it means to be an artist.

Sightings: New Art at the Nasher is a series of small-scale exhibitions and installations that invite established and emerging contemporary sculptors from across Texas and around the world to create new work in response to the unique collection and architectural context of the Nasher Sculpture Center. The series focuses on artists whose work draws on modernist precedents, yet reconsiders accepted notions and generates new ideas about modern and contemporary sculpture. In doing so, the exhibitions expand upon, invigorate, and re-contextualize the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection, which is noted for its strong holdings in work by modern masters such as Calder, Giacometti, Matisse, Miro, Moore, Picasso, Rodin, and David Smith, among others. In addition, inviting contemporary artists to engage the variety of spaces of the Nasher Sculpture Center in new, thought-provoking ways provides occasions to examine the evolving relationship between sculpture and architecture, also a hallmark of the modernist era.