Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson

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Description

The first full-scale survey of projects by this renowned contemporary Icelandic artist to appear in the United States, this exhibition gathers works from major public and private collections worldwide and spans Eliasson’s diverse range of artistic production from 1993 to the present, including installations, large-scale immersive environments, freestanding sculpture, and photography.

Olafur Eliasson is among the most influential and widely acclaimed artists of his generation. From light-filled environments to walk-in kaleidoscopes, his uniquely participatory works offer alluring spaces that harness optical cognition and meteorological elements, examine the intersection of nature and science, and explore the boundary between the organic and the artificial. Having been raised partly in Iceland, Eliasson is informed in his practice by that country’s primordial landscape and spectacular weather. He recontextualizes elements such as light, water, ice, fog, arctic moss, and lava rock to create altogether new circumstances that shift the viewer’s consciousness and sense of place. By extension, his work prompts an intensive engagement with the world outside and a fresh consideration of everyday life.

Eliasson was born in Denmark in 1967 to Icelandic parents and presently divides his time between his family’s home in Copenhagen and his studio complex in Berlin. In the early 1990s, he joined an emerging generation of artists who were seeking to expand upon conventional object making through the use of ephemeral and intangible materials—in Eliasson’s case, light, wind, heat, and especially water, in all its various stages from liquid to solid. The crux of his practice was honed during his student days at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Arts, which he attended from 1989 through 1995. At the same time, he was inspired by pioneers of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s, including Robert Irwin and James Turrell, and he was equally receptive to the Italian Arte Povera movement. It was also during his student days that he began an ongoing engagement with the philosophy of phenomenology and its focus on the workings of consciousness, especially visual perception, which led him to integrate visual phenomena as an artistic tool.

Organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by Madeleine Grynsztejn, Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture. The organizing curator at the Dallas Museum of Art is Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art.

Information from the museum's site

Event posted Oct. 15, 2007
Last updated Oct. 15, 2007