BOLDTYPE ISSUE #60: Artwork By
The cover of this issue of Boldtype features a detail of a photograph of Olafur Eliasson's Colour spectrum kaleidoscope, a 2003 installation. This work and other pieces from 1991 to 2006 are featured in Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, a monograph published by Thames & Hudson, in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Eliasson's body of work is willfully diverse, though he often returns to the same tropes: artificial suns, mirrors, mist, geodesic domes, water, and the visual tricks that can be played with refracted light. Working with the unofficial mantra of "seeing yourself seeing," the artist creates stunning environments that challenge the viewer's sensory perceptions and invite active participation. While it's housed in a museum, Colour spectrum kaleidoscope exhibits Eliasson's signature desire to leap beyond the constraints of that space.
His installations often reach incredibly wide audiences, as was the case with The Weather Project, which attracted over two million visitors to London's Tate Modern, many of whom ended up laying on the floor. And New Yorkers can't help but reflect on the love-it-or-hate-it New York City Waterfalls project sponsored by the Public Art Fund, which ran up an impressive bill during this past summer. Other installations create rainbows indoors, explore the effects of rippling water, or turn moss into wallpaper.
Eliasson was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he later studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He currently has studios in both Berlin and Copenhagen. His parents were Icelandic, which meant he spent a great deal of time in their country's rich, surreal countryside. (Lest critics overemphasize the importance of those landscapes, however, he once told the Telegraph: "By the time I got to be a teenager, the only thing I was interested in was breakdance, and hip-hop and graffiti, and that definitely did not come out of nature in Iceland.") The Take Your Time exhibition originated at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and traveled to New York's Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2008; it is on view at the Dallas Museum of Art from November 9, 2008 through March 15, 2009. Eliasson thrives on crossing disciplines; this year he also designed a postage stamp in Denmark, and in 2009, his architectural project with Henning Larsen, the Icelandic National Concert and Conference Center, will be unveiled in Reykjavik.
- Scott Indrisek
