Olafur Eliasson's take on Louisiana was radical, fascinating, and unique. The central work in the first solo exhibition at the museum by the Danish-Icelandic artist was a huge, site-specific project that reversed the relationship between nature and art.
The transitions between inside and outside, culture and staged nature, became fluid and transitory, making the progress of the visitor through the museum a central issue. The exhibition consisted of three sections, each of which thematized the encounter between Eliasson’s art and Louisiana as a place. Transforming the entire South Wing into a rocky landscape, Riverbed, Eliasson focused on inhabiting space in a new way and inserted new patterns of movement into the museum.
Eliasson’s exhibition at Louisiana was site-specific, engaging with the museum’s unique identity. The exhibition consisted of three spatial sections, each of which thematized the encounter between Eliasson’s art and Louisiana as a place—physically, architecturally, and institutionally. The focus on the visitor and bodily movement through space was where Louisiana’s identity as a place and Eliasson’s practice as an artist intersected.
RIVERBED
The central work in the exhibition, Riverbed (2014), which was made specifically for the museum, was based on the unique connection between nature, architecture, and art that characterizes Louisiana. Eliasson’s work transformed the place in one sweeping artistic move: a rocky riverbed that took up the museum’s entire South Wing.
A surface of rocks covered the floors as the bed for a stream of water winding through the galleries. Eliasson’s work was about walking, but it also touched on more fundamental questions about how the architectural and institutional framework set up a playing field for the users. What kind of behavior did the museum invite, and what conventions and habits were associated with visiting a museum? What types of social encounters could happen at a museum like Louisiana? The work operated on this general level, simply in the way its scale transformed the existing space into an entirely different space and thus implicitly invited a different kind of behavior.
3 VIDEOS WORKS
This sculptural approach to the body’s movement in space was also at the heart of three recent film works presented in The Hall Gallery. In Movement microscope (2011), we followed a group of dancers in Olafur Eliasson’s studio on what was otherwise an ordinary working day. In Your embodied garden (2013), Eliasson explored a Chinese garden in Suzhou through the minimal movements of the choreographer Steen Koerner. In Innen Stadt Aussen (2010), we got a double portrait of Berlin in motion.
MODELROOM
The third station of the exhibition was Model room (2003), a key work in Eliasson’s production that was always adapted to the specific exhibition situation. Here, Eliasson showed around 400 geometric models used in developing artworks. The installation transformed the Jorn Gallery into a workspace, a curated window into Eliasson’s laboratory, revealing the unbroken flow between experiment, process, and finished work that distinguished Eliasson’s method as an artist.
CONTACT IS CONTENT
Contact is Content
Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2014.
Contact is Content
Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2014.
Contact is Content
Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2014.
Contact is Content
Studio Olafur Eliasson, 2014.
