Olafur Eliasson's take on Louisiana is radical, fascinating and unique. The central work is a huge, site- specific project that reverses the relation between nature and art. At the same time focus on local sensory experience in a global perspective. The transitions between inside and outside, culture and staged nature become fluid and transitory – and the progress of the visitor through the museum take centre stage.

Tomorrow, on 20 August 2014 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art opens its doors for the first solo exhibition of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The main work in the exhibition, a giant landscape, will unfold throughout the South Wing of the museum in one great sweep as a major intervention in the museum’s usual administration of art in space, affording the viewer the opportunity to think about the aesthetic experience as more than just the encounter between the visitor and works on the floor or walls.

Although Olafur Eliasson’s stone landscape may look like a stress-test of Louisiana’s physical capacity, it is a manifestation of the fundamental idea of the museum: to subject itself to something that both challenges the expectations of everyday life and puts it into perspective. In this case the empty landscape can perhaps restore to us a time and space purged of information and meaning. We can breathe for a moment; no one expects anything special from us – we are in an agenda-free zone.

Olafur Eliasson's solo exhibition at Louisiana is site-specific and engages with the museum’s unique identity. The exhibition consists of three sections that each thematize the encounter between Eliasson’s art and Louisiana as a place. The central work, Riverbed (2014), is based on the unique connection between nature, architecture and art that characterizes the museum. Transforming the entire South Wing into a rocky landscape, Eliasson focuses on inhabiting space in a new way and inserts new patterns of movement into the museum.

This sculptural approach to the body’s movement in space is also at the heart of three recent film works presented in The Hall Gallery,

  • Your embodied garden, 2013. In Your embodied garden Eliasson explores a Chinese garden in Suzhou through the minimal movements of the choreographer Steen Koerner.
  • Movement microscope, 2011. In Movement microscope we follow a group of dancers in Olafur Eliasson’s studio on what is otherwise an ordinary working day.
  • Innen Stadt Aussen, 2010. In Innen Stadt Aussen we get a double portrait of Berlin in motion.

The third station of the exhibition is the Model room (2003), an installation that opens a window into Eliasson’s laboratory, revealing the unbroken flow between experiment, process and finished work that distinguishes his method as an artist.

The model room in the North Wing of the museum is in constant development for new models/projects are constantly being added. Eliasson has developed the comprehensive collection of geometrical models in close collaboration with the Icelandic artist Einar Thorsteinn. The model room is a gaze into the artist’s intellectual workshop.

Where.- Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Gl. STRANDVEJ 13. 3050 HUMLEBÆK. Denmark.
When.- From August 20th, 2014 to January 4, 2015.

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​Olafur Eliasson (Copenhagen, 1967) studied at the Royal Academy of the Arts in Copenhagen between 1989 and 1995. He represented Denmark in the 2003 Venice Biennale and has exhibited his work at numerous international museums. His work is part of private and public collections such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles and Tate Modern in London, where his seminal work The weather project was exhibited. Eliasson lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen.

Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project at Tate Modern, London. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, a survey exhibition organised by SFMOMA in 2007, travelled until 2010 to various venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

As professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Eliasson founded the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute of Space Experiments) in 2009, an innovative model of arts education. In 2012, he launched Little Sun, a solar-powered lamp developed together with the engineer Frederik Ottesen to improve the lives of the approximately 1.6 billion people worldwide without access to electricity. Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, for which he created the façade in collaboration with Henning Larsen Architects, was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Award 2013.

Verklighetsmaskiner (Reality machines) at t he Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2015, became the museum’s most visited show by a living artist. In 2016 Eliasson created a series of interventions for the palace and gardens of Versailles, including an enormous artificial waterfall that cascaded into the Grand Canal.

His other projects include Studio Other Spaces, an international office for art and architecture which he founded in Berlin in 2014 with  architect Sebastian Behmann; and Little Sun, a social business and global project providing clean, affordable light  and encouraging sustainable development, with engineer Frederik  Ottesen.

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Published on: August 19, 2014
Cite: "Riverbed by Olafur Eliasson" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/riverbed-olafur-eliasson> ISSN 1139-6415
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