Olafur Eliasson

With images that suggest a modern day Caspar David Friedrich, sculptor, installation artist and photographer Olafur Eliasson recreates in elegant forms the extremes of the landscape and the atmospheric conditions of his native Denmark, resulting in a kind of techno-Romanticism. Now based in Berlin, Eliasson rebuilds in the gallery fragments of a faraway land: icebergs at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 'windmills' at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark. For Eliasson, immaterial sensations such as temperature, smell, taste, air and magnetic waves become sculptural elements. A simple circular cut in the ceiling of a gallery in Los Angeles, for example, recreates the feeling of the weak Scandinavian sun, and becomes a kind of giant sun-clock reminiscent of both Gordon Matta-Clark's architectural cut-outs and the oculus of the Pantheon.
In her survey, curator Madeleine Grynsztejn examines the unique position of the artist, overlapping technological and artistic innovation in the creation of his art. Critic and curator Daniel Birnbaum discusses with the artist the role of location and the immediate environment in both his gallery (indoor) and remote-site (outdoor) work. Architectural theorist Michael Speaks looks in his Focus at the work Green river (1998) particularly in relation to filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 film, Red Desert. The artist has selected an extract from Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution (1907) dealing with our subjective, visual response to nature, a theme central also in the artist's own work. Olafur Eliasson's writings include an essay on that most banal of topics, the weather, and an open letter entitled 'Dear Everybody' addressed to the viewers.

Michael Speaks is Director of the Metropolitan Research and Design Post-graduate Program at the Southern Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles.