Tag: olafur eliasson

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.

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.

“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.”

Continue reading “Olafur Eliasson Pattern Detection”

“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.”

I know there’s a whole gallery of them, but the watercolors in Olafur Eliasson’s show opening today at Tanya Bonakdar in NYC look absolutely unreal to me. I keep waiting for the images to finish loading.

Olafur Eliasson: Your Psychoacoustic Light Ensemble, 24 Oct-19 Dec 2024 [tanyabonakdar]

The Olafur carpet of the year is back. The estimate is lower.

Oh hey it’s one of those drawings Olafur Eliasson made on a boat with his dad.

The map is not of the wave on the sea, but of the boat on the wave.

11 June 2024, 921/441: Olafur Eliasson & Elias Hjörleifsson, “Wave drawing from north of Iceland” 40-50,000 DKK [bruun-rasumussen.dk]

[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.

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.

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.]

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.

Nouveau SAMMANLÄNKAD Lampe table énerg sol à LED 69,99€ [ikea.fr]

Yesterday Olafur Eliasson posted a work to Instagram that I hadn’t seen before. It is 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.

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:

Continue reading “What’s Cookin’?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.]

22 Oct 2020, Lot 292 “Olafur Eliasson, The Jökla Series, 2004,” est. GBP 50-70,000 [sothebys]

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?