With images that suggest a modern-day Caspar David Friedrich, sculptor Eliasson recreates in elegant forms the extremes of the landscape and the atmospheric conditions of his native Iceland, resulting in a new kind of techno-Romanticism. Based in Berlin, Eliasson rebuilds in the gallery fragments of his faraway land: icebergs at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, "windmills" at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark. For Eliasson, immaterial sensations such as temperature, smell, taste, air and magnetic waves become sculptural elements when presented in an art context. A simple circular cut in the ceiling of a gallery in Los Angeles, for example, recreates the feeling of the weak sun in Iceland, and becomes a kind of giant sun-clock reminiscent of both Matta-Clark's architectural cut-outs and the oculus of the Pantheon. Eliasson has become a recurring favourite in recent Biennales; his beautiful, quiet works inspired by themes of nature, isolation and introspection have made him among the best known and most admired names. His work has been seen in nearly every important international survey of new art, among them "Cream", the Venice Biennale, 1999, the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale 1997, the Istanbul Biennale 1997, the Sydney Biennale 1998 and the Sao Paulo Biennale, 1997, to name only a few. In 2002 Eliasson is nominated for the Hugo Boss prize and will be featured in the Guggenheim Museum's short-list exhibition in New York.
About the Author
Madeleine Grynstejn (Survey) is senior curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She was previously curator of the 1999 Carnegie International, and curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art since 1997. Grynsztejn was associate curator (1992-96) and acting department head (1996) for 20th-century painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, and associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1[zasłonięte]986-19). Daniel Birnbaum (Interview) is a contributing editor of Artforum and the author of several books on art and philosophy, including The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl's Phenomenology (1998) and, Production (2000 with the artist Carsten Holler). From 1998 to 2000 he was the director of IASPIS, an artists' residency programme based in Stockholm. Since January 2001 he has been the Director of Portikus and the Stadelschule Art Academy, both in Frankfurt. Michael Speaks (Focus) is an architecture theorist who has taught in the graphic design department at the Yale School of Art, in the architecture departments at Harvard University and Columbia University, among others. He is currently Graduate Program Head at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. The founding editor of Polygraph and Senior Editor at ANY magazine in New York, he was also the Series Editor for 'Writing Architecture' published by the MIT Press. Speaks has edited several books on contemporary architecture and culture including The Critical Landscape (1997). For his Artist's Choice Eliasson has selected an extract from Creative Evolution (1907) by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1[zasłonięte]859-19) on the relationship between the objective reality of the physical world in contrast to our subjective experience of it. Olafur Eliasson has written short essays on such themes as the weather and colour that share the same playful, inventive nature in his art. Also included is a letter to his viewers explaining the co-existence in his work of art, architecture, and science, all experienced simultaneously through the viewer's movement through his large installations.
