Take your time: Olafur Eliasson

November 9, 2008–March 15, 2009
Barrel Vault, and Hanley, Lamont, Rachofsky, Stoffel, and Hoffman Galleries

This fall the Dallas Museum of Art presents the internationally acclaimed exhibition Take your time: Olafur Eliasson. This exhibition gathers works from major public and private collections worldwide and spans Eliasson’s diverse range of artistic production from 1993 to the present, including installations, large-scale immersive environments, freestanding sculpture and photography.

The Dallas presentation of this exhibition, the third U.S. venue of an international tour that Time magazine named one of the best exhibits of the year, will display several of the works previously shown in San Francisco, where the show originated, and New York and will add a new piece to the touring exhibition that has yet to be seen in the U.S.

This first full-scale survey of approximately twenty of Eliasson’s works “cements the 40-year-old artist’s reputation,” said the Los Angeles Times; the New York Times called his work “enchanting, spacious, evanescent and intellectually stimulating.” “He is one of the most ingenious, far-sighted and productive artists working today,” wrote the Wall Street Journal, “motivated by complex philosophical and social theories and yet immensely popular with crowds.”

“Eliasson likes to be emotional and likes that his work provokes emotions,” said María de Corral, The Hoffman Family Adjunct Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and the organizing curator of the Dallas presentation. “As he says, ‘being emotional does not imply just feelings, but also a social responsibility.’ Eliasson is interested in the physical, social and political aspects of his work, and for this reason he tries to narrate experiences and produce reactions in the viewer,” de Corral continues. “As visitors to this exhibition will see, for Eliasson, the viewer’s experience is important, and here, the title tells us more about that experience: Take your time refers to ‘the time the viewer decides to invest in looking at the work of art, and the time that the work of art engages the viewer and makes him/her stay to experience it.’”

Eliasson is among the most influential and widely acclaimed artists of his generation. From light-filled environments to walk-in kaleidoscopes, his uniquely participatory works offer alluring spaces that harness optical cognition and meteorological elements, examine the intersection of nature and science, and explore the boundary between the organic and artificial.

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is designed to encourage viewers to understand the range of this artist’s methodology, with each gallery demonstrating one of five fundamental aspects of his practice: a distinctive use of mirrors to displace the viewer’s perception of both object and self; an exploration of light and optical phenomena via immersive environments that rely upon the viewer for full effect; a deep attention to and manipulation of landscape referents; a disposition toward scientific methods and materials, including the willful exposure of the creative process; and, finally, photographic suites of the Icelandic landscape.

Included in Take your time are approximately twenty of what are considered his most outstanding and mind-blowing works including Beauty (1993), a curtain of mist that shows something different to each viewer; Jokla Series (2004), a set of forty-eight chromogenic color prints; and 360º room for all colours (2002), which makes spectators acutely aware of vision’s active role in Eliasson’s artwork; and Moss wall (1994), a solid wall of living Icelandic moss; Tunnel (2007).

Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn. Organizing curator in Dallas is María de Corral, The Hoffman Family Adjunct Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Lead support was provided by Helen and Charles Schwab and the Mimi and Peter Haas Fund. Generous support was provided by the Bernard Osher Foundation, the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation, and SFMOMA’s Collectors Forum. Additional support was provided by Patricia and William Wilson III, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts.


Olafur Eliasson, the artist

Eliasson was born in Denmark in 1967 to Icelandic parents and presently divides his time between his family’s home in Copenhagen, his studio complex in Berlin and long periods of work in Iceland. In the early 1990s he joined an emerging generation of artists who were seeking to expand upon conventional object making through the use of ephemeral and intangible materials—in Eliasson’s case, light, wind, heat, and especially water, in all its various stages from liquid to solid.
The crux of his practice was honed during his student days at Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Arts, which he attended from 1989 through 1995. At the same time he was inspired by pioneers of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s, including Robert Irwin and James Turrell, and he was equally receptive to the European Arte Povera movement. It was also during his student days that he began an ongoing engagement with the philosophy of phenomenology and its focus on the workings of consciousness, especially visual perception, which led him to integrate visual phenomena as an artistic tool.

Eliasson had his first solo exhibition in Copenhagen in 1992 and was introduced to the American public in 1996 by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. But it was in 2003 that he captivated the art world with a massive environment called The weather project—a gigantic artificial sun installed inside the Turbine Hall at London’s Tate Modern. Incorporating the artist’s signature elements of light, mirrors and mist, the monumental installation attracted enormous critical success and nearly two million visitors.

Though celebrated internationally as one of the most important artists working today, Olafur Eliasson’s oeuvre has received less exposure in the United States. Some fifteen years have elapsed since the start of his career, and his multifaceted production on a variety of scales will at last be unified for American audiences in this presentation.

Press:
The New York Times, 09/02/07

Image: Olafur Eliasson, 360° room for all colours, 2002, stainless steel, projection foil, fluorescent lights, wood, and control unit, installation view at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, private collection, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, © 2007 Olafur Eliasson