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Olafur Eliasson: Your chance encounter
Events
Written by KALONSNET Editor   
Published: December 30 2009

Olafur Eliasson Your watercolour horizon, detail, 2009 Stainless steel, steel, wood, rubber, water, glass prism, HMI lamp Dimensions variable Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson © 2009 Olafur Eliasson

In marking its fifth anniversary, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa will hold a large-scale solo exhibition structured around new works by the Danish/ Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson titled Your chance encounter.” Olafur Eliasson is known for his exploration of the human perception. His works, often using light, shadow, color, fog, wind, waves, and other phenomena of nature as materials, make apparent to the viewer the mechanisms employed in their presentation. Contrary to what might be expected, this enables people to enjoy more purely the act of seeing, as they discover and experience their surroundings. For example, in Your atmospheric colour atlas, 2009, a large gallery is filled with artificially produced fog, imbued with color emanating from fluorescent tubes of red, green and blue. By moving about in the locations where the colors blend, viewers endlessly create their own color spectrum. Based on a profound understanding of SANAA’s design for this museum, both architecturally and functionally, Eliasson boldly engages the factors that constitute 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. In Eye activity line, 2009, 317 canvases of different colors, each about the size of an A5 sheet of paper, are installed on the wall of a long corridor. As our eye follows along the work, which is like a full palette of colors, we are freshly awakened to the character of the space. In such ways, Eliasson explores the Museum’s unique features, displaying works not only in galleries but also in corridors and rest areas, so as to give play to the Museum’s meandering layout and horizontal character, and endeavoring through his artworks to bring interior and exterior into close connection. As they move through the museum building, visitors may be surprised at how Eliasson has transformed the familiar art museum spaces. Eliasson is interested in how 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa—an art museum designed with the functions of a new generation of museums—fulfills a social role as a museum opened to the city. Through this exhibition, he is re-proposing the art museum, not simply as a facility for viewing art in a context removed from society but as a public space having the potential to deeply engage in the society and the urban environment. * The text provided by 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Last Updated on November 21 2009
 

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