I’ve never quite figured out these early Olafur Eliasson photos of agates. They’re from 1995. The first one I saw, in 2007, was called Big Stone. So’s the one selling this week in Stockholm.
But one in between, at Bruun-Rasmussen in 2019, was called Stenbillede, Stone Picture.
They feel like paintings, found abstraction, which is not abstract at all. And for that matter, not found, either. Agates only look like this when they’re cut open and polished.
They feel like part of Eliasson’s exploration of photography, something aside or before he developed his photo series based on taxonomies and moving through the landscape.
Or maybe it developed alongside. One of the first photo grid/series was already done: Petrun’s Garden Series, 1994, is a 20-image documentation [sic] of a visit to an apparently famous-in-Iceland private museum of a rock collection. In his 2004 exhibition essay, Matt Drutt noted that Olafur took pictures in walkthrough snapshot mode, and visited with his father, also a rock collector.
Are these large photos details of Petrun’s rocks? Or Olafur’s dad’s? Is there unacknowledged indexical or autobiographical content here? Or a deeper backstory connecting these sumptuous photos to Olafur’s earlier paintings? So far the only thing for sure is they are what they say they are: big stone pictures.
[Next morning update]: I was stymied by not being able to find references I remembered being on Eliasson’s site. But this morning I found the 1993 Stalke Gallery show Stenserie, Stone Series, which is considered his first photo series. The 1995 date must be the printed/realized date for later numbers in the edition. It sounds like there were originally seven images in the series, and in 2005, there was a(nother?) series of eight.