popy actually: Portrait Of The Week

For this week’s portrait’s I wish to take a close look to one of my favorite contemporary artists, Olafur Eliasson. I discovered him while a trip in New York in 2008, at a MOMA exhibition, where a few of his works were featured. I directly fell in love with his art for many reasons but the main being that I found that his works didn’t let anyone indifferent as they altered the universe around us while incorporating us in them. By reading the article, you will be able to understand what I mean about that…

Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 and started producing works in the 90’s. The immaterial is the center of his works with each of the projects and exhibitions quite ephemeral in time. His belief in the principle that there is a contradiction between experience and the knowledge we have of the visible world, led him to explore, beyond the boundaries of human perception, the relations between nature, architecture and technology. By combining science and technology with artificial production of natural phenomenon ( such as fog, waterfalls, sun, etc), Eliasson plunges the spectators in a psychological and physiological experience enabling them to question the familiar and the commonly known as well as differences between nature and culture.

His works were subjects to numerous individual exhibitions in museums and galleries throughout the world as for example the extraordinary “Weather Project” at the Tate Modern in London in 2003.

I would like to take a closer look at this particular show as I found it just amazing. In this installation, a representation of the sun and sky dominated the Turbine Hall of the Tate with a fine mist penetrating the space as if creeping in from outside. Throughout the day, this mist accumulated into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. The visitors were completely immerged in this “suffocating” environment with the sun being the main subject. For this project, Eliasson based himself on the subject of the weather which widely shapes many everyday discussions and took this subject as the basis for exploring ideas about experience, mediation and representation. Images speaks louder than words so take a look at pictures from this project.

Now, time to take a look at others of his amazing projects. The selection is clearly subjective and of course non exhaustive as I just chosen to show my favorite ones. Should you wish to see more from this artist, click here.