Your atmospheric color atlas, 209
“What happens when we explore the opportunity to deconstruct reality, to make the invisible explicit ?”. In that exploration he has been immersed Olafur Eliasson for more than two decades. Now him Guggenheim Bilbao pick up some of his installations and works most emblematic in collaboration with the London Tate Modern on the exposition In real life , which can be seen until April 4, 2021.
Beauty (Beauty), 1993
Maybe it's the anguish of immensity, of the abstract, of the incomprehensible which leads Olafur Eliasson to bring it all to the human scale . Thus, the Danish artist of Icelandic blood is an expert in decontextualize natural elements and in bring strangeness to the everyday to wake us up He makes sense: if the vastness is manageable we are closer to understanding it.
WE ARE NATURE
“We are nature ”, asserts Eliasson convinced, “ we are bacteria, cells, atoms … and when we think about what makes us up is when we create culture ”. Nature is in everything. Not surprisingly, this covers the entire trajectory of Olafur Eliasson , known for his commitment to sustainability , with the natural and social environment of it.
Big Bang Fountain, 2014
Denature a waterfall ( 'Waterfall' , 1998) that is one and many at the same time and that becomes a loop to make the time and place we occupy in the world visible. kidnap a rainbow and takes him to a museum room ( 'Beauty' -'Beauty' , 1993-) so that we are aware that Faced with the same reality, each experience is different. . Take greenland ice blocks and places them in a Paris square ( 'Ice Watch' , 2015) so that we are Witnesses of the thaw -and its soundtrack-. Eight days it took to melt 20,000 years of frozen water.
“It was a way for people to have a physical relationship with what was happening” . They could touch the ice. Hear it. Feel that climate change that politicians talk about and journalists write about. “One of our evils is that we have so much information that it is very difficult for us to gather experience”, he comments in the auditorium of the Basque Guggenheim.
His deeds are like a slap on the back of the neck, an 'awake!' of unusual beauty . Changing the world is for him” change the way we experience the world ”. From there we can modify things, “ build a better future ”. He knows what he does and the role that we play as spectators.
The glacier melt series 1999/2019, 2019
THE FOLIE
That is why his work obliges us to experiment, to take sides and to keep our senses alert . He takes our brain out of the comfort zone. The ultimate meaning of his work is built by us. For Elijah " good art creates meaning and investigates the meaning it creates at the same time ”. And as witnesses -and protagonists- we are part of that system.
Your uncertain shadow (color)
It's what happens in 'Your shadow uncertain (color)' ('Your uncertain shadow, Colour', 2010), one of the works that are part of the tour. In her, our shadows reveal the colors that make up an apparently white light projected on a wall. “We are not in a museum to consume art, we are here to produce art ”, comments the artist.
By introducing us to your 'Room for one color' ('Room for one colour', 1997) he steals our colors - yes, blue, red, green, literally - with the cunning of a shellfish and breaks our eyes and frowns. Everything suddenly turns black and white , like almost everything in the Iceland of its origins.
Room for one color (Room for one color), 1997
In 'Your spiral vision' ('Your spiral view', 2002) and 'Your planetary window' ('Your planetary window', 2019) the lights and shadows that attract the artist so much return to play with our perception with respect to the position we occupy in space through reflections.
Eliasson gets that accept the challenge and help him show the distant , what hides in the empty walls. It is curious that this obligation to participate in his work becomes seconds later in a game . he calls it the folie , madness in French. “ Let's celebrate the madness . We need a liberating place. The museum is a safe space for this and constitutes a meeting point between the work and the visitor”.
In real life (In real life), 2019
**"THEY HAVE BLINDED US" **
The exhibition is made up of a thirty works that Olafur Eliasson has developed over two decades. Your series of photographs 'The melting of the glaciers 1999/2019' ('The glacier melt series 1999/2019, 2019') represents the parenthesis between the first photo he took of a Iceland glacier in 1999 to the last one he took from a plane in 2019 . The glacier has disappeared to the point where he himself is unable to recognize it from the air: "It is very difficult to see something that is absent."
Make the invisible visible . And question it. “They have given us a central perspective and that has created an incredible machine, but it has blinded us. We have the right to value that everything is built and that it is formed by systems ”. And according to the artist, we still have time to redefine those conservative structures, "to redesign them so that tomorrow is better than yesterday."
Waterfall, 2019