ART CITIES:Vienna-Olafur Eliasson, BAROQUE BAROQUE

BAROQUE BAROQUE is a exhibition in Vienna that brings together a selection of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s artworks from the private collections of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) & Juan and Patricia Vergez and places them into the baroque spaces of the Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Archive

Within this terrain of doubling and paradox, Olafur Eliasson calls into question our received habits of seeing and experiencing space. His artworks make us wonder and reconsider. The exhibition challenges viewers’ habits of perception and proposes that reality can be understood as unstable and evolving, as a process of constant negotiation. While emphasizing the way spaces are constructed by history and tradition, his works address the viewer in her embodied experience. Through the use of projections, shadows, and reflections, the artworks foreground the relationship between body, perception, and image. They anchor agency in the body and mind in motion as they invite the viewer’s active engagement by mirroring, fragmenting, and inverting her position within space. “I find it inspiring that the baroque exhibited such confidence in the fluidity of the boundaries between models of reality and, simply, reality. The presentation of my works at the Winter Palace is based on trust in the possibility of constructing reality according to our shared dreams and desires and on faith in the idea that constructions and models are as real as anything”, said Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson’s optical machines and installations such as: “Kaleidoscope”, “New Berlin Sphere”, “Your welcome reflected” and “Seu planeta compartilhado”, reflect the artist’s ongoing investigations of color, perception, transformation, and deconstruction, an inquiry that is particularly interesting in relation to the baroque context. A site-specific intervention in the form of a continuous mirror traversing the enfilade of grand rooms further disorients the viewer by folding and re-folding the complex spaces it produces. “Wishes versus wonders”, a steel half-ring mounted to the mirror wall in the Hall of Battle Paintings, is site-specific intervention in the form of a continuous mirror traversing the enfilade of grand rooms further disorients the viewer by folding and re-folding the complex spaces it produces. The installation stages an encounter between reality, illusion, and the elaborate artifice of the surroundings, simultaneously multiplying lines of potentiality.

Info: Curators: Daniela Zyman & Mario Codognato, The Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Himmelpfortgasse 8, Vienna, Duration: 21/11/15-6/3/16, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-18:00, www.olafurbaroque.at