Window for moving light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
I didn’t notice it when I blogged about it last December, probably because I was so fixated on the heliostat. But a few weeks ago I gave a talk about stained glass, and the prolonged looking at Olafur Eliasson’s 2024 stained glass project, Window for moving light led to a realization.
Upper section detail, Window for moving light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
“The geometric pattern of the stained-glass window installed in the Gothic eastern windows develops from diamonds and squares at the bottom to large overlapping circles above. The glass panels transition in color from red to yellow to transparent and blue at the top, creating a chromatic fade inspired by the palette of Caspar David Friedrich.”
Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, stained glass and heliostat, St Nicholas Cathedral, Greifswald, Germany, image: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
Olafur Eliasson has created a work of light and handblown glass for the east windows of St. Nicholas’s Cathedral in Greifswald, a Hanseatic city near the Baltic coast of Germany, which was the birthplace of Caspar David Friedrich. Originally built in the 14th century, the church was remade in the 19th century with woodwork by Friedrich’s brother, Christian Adolph, including the elaborate Gothic choir wall which closes off the windows from the rest of the interior.
The work is titled, Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for Moving Light). Because the east window only catches the morning sun for a small portion of the day—and that portion is limited further by the building directly across the street—Eliasson installed a heliostat, a mirror that tracks the movement of the sun, on that building to reflect afternoon sun into the morning window.
Olafur Eliasson, Window for Moving Light, 2024, exterior view of the east facade of St Nicholas’s Cathedral, Greifswald, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
When I first discussed with Olafur an idea for a work that involved a heliostat reflecting light into our north-facing apartment in New York, in 2003, [while I had the concept, he already knew what a heliostat was and where to get one], I imagined sunlight that doesn’t move around the room would become very unsettling.
So it is buck wild to see a similar setup behind the altar of a church, where it is intended to encourage “pause and reflection – aspects central to both the Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich and Protestant spirituality.”
Or does an beam of sunlight coming at an uncharacteristic time into a building oriented so specifically have a different effect? The afternoon sun from the east can become a metaphor, or it can encourage pause and reflection on the human, artistic intervention that produced it, drawing viewers’ attention to the world outside the church.
Olafur Eliasson, Diffused watercolour rainbow, 2024, Watercolour on paper, 46 5/8 x 63 1/2 in. via
“The illusion of light, long a desiderata of painters in Western art history, is here the result of applying thin, translucent layers of pigment in succession, with a precision of execution that creates a completely seamless transition through the color spectrum. The pristine, vaporous rainbow seems to emanate from the paper, the large scale enveloping the viewer in color.”
These Afangar Icelandic Series prints were the first Richard Serra prints I ever saw, and they left a deep impression. MoMA hung these rough, craggy prints off the lobby in late 1991, and they felt very much like prints about sculpture, which is something I’d never considered before. But I resolved to get some—which I’ve failed to do, not realizing that they’d sold out long before I knew they existed—and also to visit Afangar, the sculpture in Iceland they related to. Which only took four years.
Black Quasi Bricks, 2003, at neugerrimschneider, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
Scrolling in the Olafur Eliasson results on liveauctioneers for farflung oddities I’d missed, I came across this unexpected familiar item right in front of me that I’d also missed.
Collection in Transformation: installation view at MASP, São Paulo. photo: MASP via designboom
It’s been almost ten years since Adriano Pedrosa brought Lina Bo Bardi’s glass & concrete easels back to MASP in São Paulo, and I guess I thought the world would have long since filled up with photos from the back. It is literally the first thing I think about every time I see one.
“Wave drawing from north of Iceland”, 1998, ink on paper, 64 x 45 cm, via bruun-rasmussen.dk
Oh hey it’s one of those drawings Olafur Eliasson made on a boat with his dad.
photo of the pendulum drawing apparatus Olafur Eliasson and his father Elias Hjörleifsson created on his father’s boat, 1999, image via olafureliasson.net
The map is not of the wave on the sea, but of the boat on the wave.
[update: the listing is gone, after the artist’s studio said it was a work of Hjörleifsson only. Such things are always complicated, I suppose, but perhaps more scholarly interest in Hjörleifsson’s oeuvre will clear things up.] Previously, related: Mapping Olafur Mapping [in which, now that I mention it, this boat/pen project was described as Elias’s, not Eliasson’s.]
[november 2024 update: it is back, as a work by Hjörleifsson. Glad this is sorted out.]
This custom woven, 10-meter extension cord in an edition of 100 is absolutely one of my favorite Olafur Eliasson editions, because it is an extension cord.
360° room for all colours[including the bisexual ones], 2002, installed at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2004, photo: Jens Ziehe via olafureliasson.net
I haven’t ever asked why it exists, but the title, 10 Meter Cable For All Colours and the date, 2004, suggest a connection to Olafur’s 2002 work, 360° room for all colours. This curving spatial structure is filled with red, green and blue lights that shift through all the colours. It was first shown in Paris in 2002, and then in the 2004 Your Lighthouse: Works of Light, 1991-2004 at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, which opened in the glare of Olafur’s Tate Turbine Hall project.
installation view zoomed in on lightbulbs and cables at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 2004, image: Alexander Krauss via olafureliasson.net
This unusual top-down installation view of a work which typically had a scrim ceiling shows not only the tightly packed lightbulbs in the wall, but also a thick bundle of extension cords to power them, running up and out of site.
While this work might account for why Olafur had several kilometers of electrical cable lying around the studio, it still doesn’t explain why there’s an edition. My guess would be that a few spools of leftover cable were transformed from surplus into artwork by whatever that mysterious process is, and they were given to employees, friends, and whoever. There is a whole body of this kind of small, interpersonal edition that grows out of the studio’s practice and relationships, and I think it’s just neat.
This example, for sale in a couple of weeks at Bruun-Rasmussen in Denmark, is ed. 4/100, perhaps from someone at the top of the artist’s list. [B-R offered ed. 1/100 in 2012, which was somehow not deluxe enough to reach the DKK 30000 estimate. The current example is expected to sell for DKK6000, under USD1000, which feels like the right balance of reasonable and ridiculous, but most importantly, not too expensive to put it right to actual use.]
James Futcher of IKEA and Felix Hallwachs of Little Sun standing next to a guy holding the only SAMMANLÄNKAD LED solar lamp in the world, apparently, in Olafur Eliasson’s studio [via]
Almost a month since the hype machine was activated, and two weeks since it appeared at a few—but not all—Ikea stores in Europe, there is zero sign of the Little Sun X Ikea collab in the US. This post is just me screaming into roar of an offshore wind farm, trying and failing to shop our way out of this climate disaster.
Olafur Eliasson, Suncooker, 2005, photographed at Neugerriemschneider by Jens Ziehe, via IG
Yesterday Olafur Eliasson posted a work to Instagram that I hadn’t seen before. Itis Suncooker, from 2005. It is a portable solar oven, a parabolic aluminum mirror on an angled steel frame, covered by a large, radiant disc of geometrically cut, multi-colored glass, and with a lamp at the center. It is predictably beautiful, and even though it was only one element of Stockholm Solar Lab, the artist’s installation, it was the main promotional image for the sun-themed group show at magasin 3 during 2005’s darkest winter months.
Olafur Eliasson, Seeing Plants, 2003, solar cookers, silver glazed ceramic pots, cacti, image: Jens Ziehe for OE Studio
Two things came to mind when I saw Suncooker: it looks like the same style of solar cooker that Olafur used in 2003 in his 2003 work called, not Cactuscooker, but Seeing Plants. The description on Olafur’s website reflects [sic] his ongoing interest in the viewer’s awareness of their own perception:
Olafur Eliasson, The Jokla Series, 2004, 48 aerial photos, each 36 x 52 cm, Collection: MoMA
In 2004 Olafur Eliasson made The Jokla Series, a grid of 48 aerial photos of the Jokla, a river fed by Iceland’s largest glacier, Vatnajökull, which was threatened by the proposed construction of a large dam to power an aluminum smelting plant. Aerial traces of a river’s path and hydroelectric construction sites had each been the subject of a photo grid before, in 2000.
Image of the cover of the Morgunblaðið special issue from 12 May 2005, which is 41 x 28.5 cm, btw
But by 2004 Eliasson’s prominence, and the significance of the Jokla damming controversy brought added attention to his examinations of the Icelandic landscape. In May 2005, Morgunblaðið, the largest newspaper in Iceland, published a special standalone issue containing all 48 Jokla photos, plus an essay on place by Doreen Massey.
Jökluserían wallpaper installed in the Kunsthaus Bar, Zug, 2005-06, image via olafureliasson.net
Later in 2005, Eliasson opened a show at the Kunsthaus Zug titled, “The body as brain.” Eliasson installed copies of the Morgunblaðið Jökluserían issue as wallpaper for the Kunsthaus Bar. The show remained into 2006 as part of “Projekt Sammlung,” or “collection project,” a multi-year collaboration with the innovative institution, “an artistic process in which the viewer, the work and the museum mediate anew with regard to the constitution of reality.”
Though the aluminum dam got built and the river got screwed, and the Projekt Sammlung was successful, but is dormant, The Jokla Series continues to mediate anew with regard to the constitution of reality. An extraordinary photo grid is for sale at Sotheby’s next week, which is titled The Jokla Series.
a closer look at these 51 x 62 cm in the frame objects
Its dimensions and framing differ from the The Jokla Series in MoMA’s collection, and each photo, described as c-prints by the auction house, has, not a crease, but a seam down the center.
a detail
I think they are the prints from the Morgunblaðið Jökluserían issue–two issues, actually–cut and pieced together, as the wallpaper was, and framed à la Eliasson (except for those mats, obv), by a Danish, not Swiss, framer, who I think even wrote the page numbers on the verso. If they are indeed c-prints (I’m waiting for the condition report*), then they are rephotographed images of the assembled newspaper prints, which is even more extraordinary. Olafurian reality is constituting around me anew as I stare at my screen in awe and admiration. I mean, the framing alone had to cost EUR5000.
The provenance states they came from the artist, and thence by descent, so one degree of separation from the origin/al owner. All of this is happening in the bright light of the art world assembled, at one of our most august mercantile institutions. So if this collection project stays around until the hammer drops, it will indeed be an exceptional work, with an exceptional backstory. And if it doesn’t, well, as glaciers and the rivers that flow from them can sadly attest, things we look to for permanence can suddenly change, or even disappear.
[*next morning update: this lot was withdrawn. so of course now I want to buy it.]
Olafur Eliasson, Earth Perspectives, 2020, a series of nine images of earth designed to produce afterimages, via serpentine gallery and olafureliasson.net
As part of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Back to Earth project drawing attention to Earth Day, Olafur Eliasson has created Earth Perspectives, a set of nine images of climate-critical sites on Earth designed to elicit afterimages.
Above is Greenland, whose millions-of-years-old ice sheet is melting like crazy rn. At one point I might have printed these bad boys and gridded them up like the rest of the Olafurs, but not right now, mkay?
Untitled, 1993, 70 x 190 cm, image: bruun-rasmussen.dk
Olafur Eliasson painted this in 1993. It’s apparently one of six roughly door-sized paintings in a series or group. I’ve seen a couple of early Olafur paintings, and I am puzzled by them.
This is another painting from 1993, which apparently did not sell at B-R in 2011. It also has atmospheric and landscape-ish fields of color behind traced elements of domestic architecture. Beauty, 1993, installed at the Long Museum Shanghai in 2016, image: olafureliasson.net
1993 was also the year he made Beauty, which he first showed in a garage, I believe. I’d say he was exploring a lot of different directions in 1993 and chose one. Frakkastigur, 1996, from a suite of five photogravures produced by Niels Borch Jensen
But then, that painting also reminds me of a couple of collaged image photogravures Olafur made with Niels Borch Jensen, which have always puzzled me, too, and those are from 1996.
the rest, image via nbj
Other prints from the suite have probably gotten more attention for how they seem to map out Eliasson’s project going forward, but I keep wondering about the collagey ones.
Vestmannaeyjer street covered with ash with lava fountains behind, 1973, image: usgs
A few years ago I found some stunning and very similar-looking photos of a January 1973 volcanic eruption on Heimaey, an Icelandic island where a third of the fishing village Vestmannaeyjer was buried in lava and ash.
image via heybehappy
The USGS published a booklet about how the destruction was minimized by fire fighters hosing down the face of the wall of lava with seawater as it advanced through the town, slowing it down. Olafur would have been 6, and I imagined the incident would have been formative. And I started re-considering his work through an unexpectedly autobiographical lens. When I proposed this to him, though, he didn’t buy it.
completely unrelated: Riverbed, 2014-15, installed at Louisiana Museum, DK, image: Anders Sune Berg via olafureliasson.net
I still wonder, though. And I do wonder about Olafur’s early work, including those paintings. If no one’s gonna look into it, maybe I will. Mar 7, 2017, 870/752
Olafur Eliasson: Untitled, 1993, est. 200-300,000 kr [bruun-rasmussen.dk]
Ice Watch, 2015, image: olafureliasson.net
The big Olafur Eliasson news out of Paris last week was obviously Ice Watch, the circle of ancient Greenland glacier fragments melting and popping in front of the Pantheon.
depiction of Your Star test flight, 2015, image: olafureliasson.net
This week Olafur is in Stockholm launching Your Star, a public art commission from the Nobel Committee. It is inspired, he explains, by the “space before an idea,” the space from which an idea emerges, the moment when you first register a curiosity or change. In this case, it is the change in the night sky over Stockholm caused by an LED tethered to a balloon, which is powered by a battery charged by a solar panel that captured the energy of the summer sun. Your Star is a new star that returns the light of summer to the dark night of Stockholm in December.
RT-LTA video still of Skystar 180 deploying from its monitoring station
But even if you’re still in Paris, you can get a sense that something is different in the sky, and change is afoot on the ground. @domainawareness notes that Paris intelligence officials have leased a surveillance balloon from the Israeli defense contractor RT-LTA Systems, to monitor protestors and other members of the public during the climate talks.
RT-LTA press photo of Skystar 180 deployed with 360-degree surveillance camera
The Skystar 180 was used in Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip last year, and is deployed near contested holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem, as well as throughout East Jerusalem and Palestinian areas in the occupied West Bank.
A new star rose above Stockholm last night! Your Star is a public artwork for the 2015 Nobel Week by @olafureliasson pic.twitter.com/id4qUH3Wl6
One is art, one is policing. One you watch, one watches you. It’s easy to think of differences, but Skystar and Your Star look so much alike that I have to wonder what else they have in common: they are both designed to exist in and affect public space. In his Nobel Week greeting, Olafur talked about the importance of public space:
It is where people come together, to exchange opinions, to disagree, to agree, and through doing all of this they help co-creating society. So does culture. I think it’s very important to keep our public space alive, resilient, and open for change and renegotiation.
Think of that in Paris, where protestors try to influence the political negotiators, primarily by influencing media narratives–and where the looming presence of police surveillance seeks to document what it can’t intimidate or silence by its presence. O hi. I am here, watching you. And now think of the original public sites where these aerostats are permanently deployed: occupied neighborhoods where Palestinians and Arab Israelis under decades-long seige or contestation where renegotiation takes place with rocks, bullets, tear gas, and bulldozers. It turns out both Skystar and Your Star function by being seen. The former as a projection of power and potential deterrent, the latter as an inspiration. This turns out to bear an uncanny resemblance to the original Project Echo satelloon, which was created to be a visible presence in the sky, an inspiring beacon of American power and progress. It was also intended to acclimate people to the presence of satellites overhead, to normalize the eventuality of being watched by surveillance satellites. When he originally conceived of a large inflatable satellite to win the hearts and devotion of the developing world, Wernher von Braun called it an American Star. Your Star [olafureliasson.net/yourstar] Jerusalem – Spy Balloons Give Police New View Of Jerusalem [vosizneias, the voice of the orthodox jewish community]
