ART CITIES:Bilbao-Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson uses his works, which encompass painting, photography, sculpture and large installations, to inquire into the relationships between the real and the artificial, perception and experience. His work stands out for putting viewers at the core, allowing them to delve into many of the challenges facing our society, and offering them different experiences which entail, in Eliasson’s words “taking part in the world.”

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Archive

Many of the works in Olafur Eliasson’s solo exhibition “In Real Life” at Guggenheim Museum are related to the environment and sustainability, drawing from nature and its elements to make them possible. The artist exposes viewers’ senses to materials like wood, water and moss so that they can feel the nature that humanity is destroying. Through around 30 works created between 1990 and 2020,  including sculptures, photographs, paintings, and installations, the exhibition challenges the way we navigate and perceive our environment, leading us to reflect on the urgent issues of today. Outside the museum “Waterfall” (2019) more than 11 meters tall, is constructed from scaffolding and pumps, cascades into the pond behind the museum, conjuring the same sounds and appearance of a waterfall in nature. This work shows Olafur Eliasson’s fusion of nature and technology and leaves the mechanism behind the work exposed to view, drawing visitors’ attention to the “constructed nature” in an urban setting. “Model room” (2003) contains around 450 models, prototypes and geometric studies of various sizes. Together, they form a record of Olafur Eliasson’s work with his studio team and his long collaboration with Icelandic artist, mathematician and architect Einar Thorsteinn (1942-2015).  Between 1996 and 2014 Thorsteinn and Eliasson collaborated on many projects and researched the geometric forms, symmetries and ratios that structure a number of Eliasson’s sculptures and pavilions. These models are made from a range of materials, including copper wire, cardboard, photocopies, Lego bricks, wood, foam and rubber balls. For many years, they served as a reference libraryfor Studio Olafur Eliasson. Now, Model room is held at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, but the studio, and particularly its design and geometry teams, continues to create models and prototypes as part of its research. In “Eine Beschreibung einer Reflexion, oder aber eine angenehme Übung zu deren Eigenschaften” (1995), a spotlight shines onto a circular mirror that directs the light onto a second, rotating mirror with an undulating surface. This mirror completes a full revolution every thirty seconds, reflecting, as it revolves, an irregular patch of light onto the reverse side of a circular projection screen. In “Your uncertain shadow (colour)” (2010), five colored spotlights, positioned side-by-side on the floor, project light on a white wall, where the colors blend to produce white light. When visitors walk into the space before the spotlights, their shadows appear on the wall as clusters of colorful silhouettes that amplify every movement and reveal the apparently white light’s component colors. Eliasson has long been interested in nature and the weather. From the start, he connected his experiences of the Icelandic landscape to the practice of making sculptures and installations. Some works, like “Wavemachines” (1995), replicate natural phenomena. In Mo ss wall (1994), created from Scandinavian reindeer lichen, Eliasson adds an unexpected material from outdoors to the controlled indoor space of the museum. The aroma and texture of the work affect the senses too. Eliasson has been working with mirrors and reflections since the mid-1990s. In the exhibition “Your spiral view” (2002), “Your planetary window” (2019), and the hanging works: “Cold wind sphere” (2012), “Stardust particle” (2014) and “In real life” (2019) are brought together.  Each work is structured by a complex yet regular geometric principle. The artist is particularly interested in spirals, as they create a sense of energy within the object and outside it through the shadow and light play on the surrounding walls. In “Your imaginary future” (2020), a semicircular arc mounted to a mirror on the ceiling visually combines with its reflection to create the illusion of a giant ring that traverses the mirror’s surface, uniting the actual space of the gallery with the virtual space that appears in the mirror. “Your atmospheric colour atlas” (2009)  comprises condensed banks of artificially produced fog, infused with the additive primary colors (red, green and blue) emitted from hundreds of fluorescent lights that are installed in the ceiling as a color grid. Walking through the dense, illuminated atmosphere, visitors navigate the space by using this intuitive color atlas. Eliasson often uses glacial ice in his work. Sometimes, the ice is intended as a call for action to stall climate change. Warmer temperatures have caused the Greenland ice sheet to lose around 200–300 billion tonnes of glacial ice each year, a rate that is expected to increase dramatically. In “The presence of absence pavilion” (2019), a bronze cast makes visible the empty space left by a block of glacial ice that melted away. Over the years Eliasson has created photographic series that document the country of Iceland and its natural phenomena. He has described the country as a place he needs to engage with physically by climbing, walking, swimming or even water rafting, as in “The river – raft” series (2000). Eliasson’s time in Iceland also attuned him to atmospheric conditions. This led to his interest in how artists have captured light throughout history. In “Colour experiment no. 80” and “Colour experiment no. 81” (2019), Eliasson analysed the color palettes of two paintings by German artist Caspar David Friedrich that depict the vastness of nature: “Der Mönch am Meer” (1808-10), and “Der einsame Baum” (1822). Each painting was abstracted into all the colors it contains. These were then distributed proportionately around each canvas to form an alternative color wheel. In “Big Bang Fountain” (2014) a strobe light illuminates a pulsing fountain of water, causing the bursts of water to appear to freeze into an ever-changing sequence of unique and unpredictable sculptural forms, each of which lasts for only an instant. In his childhood Eliasson traveled regularly to Iceland, forging a strong connection to his parents’ home country and its landscape. In 1999, he photographed several dozen glaciers there for an artwork called “The glacier series” . Twenty years later, he returned to photograph the same glaciers again. “The glacier melt series 1999/ 2019” (2019) brings together thirty pairs of images from 1999 and 2019 to reveal the dramatic impact that global warming is having on our world.

Info: Curators: Mark Godfrey and Lucía Agirre, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Avenida Abandoibarra 2, Bilbao, Duration: 14/2-21/6/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus