Olafur Eliasson
Riverbed
20 August 2014–4 January 2015
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13
Humlebæk
Denmark
Hours: Tuesday–Friday 11–22h,
Saturdays–Sundays and public holidays 11–18h
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art has just opened its doors for the first solo exhibition of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson’s exhibition at Louisiana is site-specific, engaging with the museum’s unique identity. The exhibition consists of three spatial sections that each thematize the encounter between Eliasson’s art and Louisiana as a place, physically, architecturally and institutionally.
The central work in the exhibition, Riverbed (2014), which is made specifically for the museum, is based on the unique connection between nature, architecture and art that characterizes Louisiana. Eliasson’s work transforms the place in one sweeping artistic move: a rocky riverbed taking up the museum’s entire South Wing. A surface of rocks covers the floors as the bed for a stream of water winding through the galleries.
Eliasson’s landscape inserts a new pattern of movement into the museum, where it is the audience’s movement through the landscape that is staged, not the artist’s. This focus on the visitor and bodily movement through space is where Louisiana’s identity as a place and Eliasson’s practice as an artist intersect.
A small library containing books by and about Olafur Eliasson has been installed in the museum’s Panorama Room, which is accessible from the farthest end of the Riverbed installation. On view here is the newly published “Contact is content” featuring landscape photographs taken by Eliasson in Iceland from 1986 to 2013.
In the Large Hall of the museum three video works are shown, each in its own way about movement. In Movement microscope (2011) we follow a group of dancers in Olafur Eliasson’s studio on what is otherwise an ordinary working day. In Your embodied garden (2013) Eliasson explores a Chinese garden in Suzhou through the minimal movements of the choreographer Steen Koerner. In Innen Stadt Aussen (2010) we get a double portrait of Berlin in motion.
The fourth station of the exhibition is Model room (2003), a key work in Eliasson’s production that is always adapted to the specific exhibition situation. Here, Eliasson shows models used in developing artworks. The installation transforms the gallery into a workspace, a curated window into Eliasson’s laboratory, revealing the unbroken flow between experiment, process and finished work that distinguishes Eliasson’s method as an artist.
For more information, see louisiana.dk.
