Olafur Eliasson |
Nel tuo tempo
Firenze, Palazzo
Strozzi
22 September 2022 -
22 January 2023
Conceived by
Studio Olafur Eliasson
Curated by Arturo
Galansino
Promoted and
organised by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
Main Supporter
Fondazione CR Firenze
NEL TUO TEMPO (IN
YOUR TIME), OLAFUR ELIASSON’s largest exhibition in Italy to date, enlists
the PALAZZO STROZZI’s Renaissance architecture in creating a powerful
dramaturgy of immaterial artworks that address subjective perception and shared
experience. The exhibition brings together new and older works that feature
light, shadows, reflections, patterns, and intense colour, and includes a major
new, site-specific installation in the courtyard and a digital artwork created
using VR technology – presented to the public for the first time at Palazzo
Strozzi.
The Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi is proud to announce Nel
tuo tempo (In your time), a major exhibition by
Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson on display throughout
the gallery and courtyard space this autumn (opening 22 September 2022). One of
the most original and visionary artists of our time, Eliasson has built up a
multifaceted practice that spans installations, paintings, sculptures,
photography, and film. Curated by Arturo Galansino, the exhibition comprises
works that directly interact with the architecture and spaces of Palazzo
Strozzi. New installations and older works subvert and refract perceptions,
using the museum building itself as an instrument for producing the art. The
Renaissance building becomes a dynamic body in which architecture, windows,
ceilings, corners and walls are activated. Subtle interventions employing
spotlights, screens, and colour filters draw attention to what is already
there. From the structures behind the exhibition to the rituals of viewing it,
Eliasson presents a multiplicity of possible narratives.
"Palazzo Strozzi returns to the contemporary with
Olafur Eliasson: Nel tuo tempo, the first major exhibition ever held in Italy
by Eliasson, one of the most original and visionary contemporary artists,
continuing our series of exhibitions dedicated to the major artists of the
present.” commented Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione
Palazzo Strozzi and curator of the exhibition. “In 2015 Olafur visited the
spaces of Palazzo Strozzi for the first time and was astonished by the
Renaissance architecture, starting a long conversation between him and the
fifteenth-century palace, a complex dialogue whose meaning is distilled into
this exhibition.”
Eliasson commented: “Nel tuo tempo is a meeting-up of
artworks, visitors, and the Palazzo Strozzi itself. This extraordinary
Renaissance building has travelled through the centuries to greet us here, now,
in the twenty-first century – not as a mere host for art but as a co-producer
of the exhibition.
Yet it is not only the Palazzo Strozzi that has travelled
across time. As visitors, you too have travelled – each mind-body different
from the others. On individual journeys – with diverse backgrounds and
experiences –we meet up in the here and now of the exhibition.”
Moving beyond the borders and physical limits of a space,
Nel tuo tempo (In your time) calls into question the distinction between
reality, perception and depiction.
THE EXHIBITION
COURTYARD
The exhibition begins with Under the weather (2022), a
site-specific artwork for the public space of Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard that
comprises a large elliptical structure over 10 meters tall and suspended 8
meters above the ground. The installation conjures a moiré effect, which
destabilises the viewers’ perception of Palazzo Strozzi’s strict orthogonal
architecture, challenging its stable, unchanging historical structure. As visitors
move around the courtyard, looking up at the work, the moiré pattern changes
and shifts, interacting with everyone individually – it is the exchange between
the viewer’s movement that activates the work, and their personal visual
experience that completes the work. Only when seen from specific vantage points
at either end of the courtyard does the ellipse appear circular.
PIANO NOBILE
Visitors move from the courtyard into the Palazzo, where
they discover Eliasson’s direct dialogue with the architecture, which he
interrogates through adding artificial lights, fleeting shadows, reflections,
moiré effects and intense colours. Far from being simply a vessel or a
backdrop, the building becomes a co-producer of the artworks, a creative tool
in interacting with visitors’ perception.
In the first three rooms of Palazzo Strozzi’s Piano
Nobile, Eliasson alters the Palazzo’s windows with installations that employ lights, colours and shadows.
The artist invites us to perceive the architecture in a new way, destabilising
our traditional understanding of it. Eliasson’s intervention in the rooms of
the Palazzo is minimal, yet he manages to create strong, engaging atmospheres
in which the central figure is the relationship between the exterior and
interior space typical of Palazzo Strozzi and its large windows overlooking both the courtyard and the street. Lights
reveal the irregularities of the glass: bubbles, scratches and dust make the
materiality of the windows evident, encouraging visitors to become aware of the
glass as a membrane separating the inside from the outside. This basic
‘mediating’ surface makes shelter and domesticity possible while also allowing
visual communication, calling to mind the large Gothic and Renaissance windows
found in churches throughout the city, in which light was considered a visible manifestation
of the divine and a metaphor for spiritual elevation.
Two works in the exhibition echo the theme of the circle
and the ellipse introduced in the courtyard: How do we live together (2019) is
a large metal arc that dramatically bisects a room at a diagonal. The effect is
a simple illusion that Eliasson has used in an array of past works, such as The
weather project (2003) at Tate Modern: a half ring is affixed to a mirror on
the ceiling so that room and ring are doubled. The half ring becomes whole,
uniting real and virtual space. The second circular installation, Solar
compression (2016), comprises a disc with mirrors on each side. Suspended in
space, it turns steadily. The artwork emits a yellow light from between the two
faces of the disc, flooding the room. The same yellow monofrequency light (in other
words, light limited to the yellow wavelengths of the visible spectrum)
saturates the installation Room for one colour (1997), reducing all colours to
shades of grey and yellow, while heightening the viewers’ perception of
details.
Beauty (1993) showcases a shimmering rainbow – in which
beams of white light shining through a curtain of mist are broken into the
colours of the visible spectrum. This apparition depends on the light projected
from a precisely angled spotlight, as refracted and reflected by the water
droplets, meeting the eye of the viewer. No two viewers see the same rainbow. Firefly
double-polyhedron sphere experiment (2020) is emblematic of Eliasson’s work and
testifies to his exploration of vision as an action of fragmentation and
complexity of thought. The large polyhedron, made of pieces of green, orange,
yellow, cyan and pink glass, spawned from the artist’s long-standing interest
in geometry and light. In the same room, visitors can peer into Colour spectrum
kaleidoscope (2003), which consists of dichromatic mirrors of various colours
in a hexagonal kaleidoscope that is mounted on a wooden tripod. Eliasson says: “Kaleidoscopes play on the fact
that what we see can easily be disorganised or reconfigured. They use a playful approach to show us
different ways of looking at the world. In that sense we might say that a
kaleidoscope represents a different point of view.”
STROZZINA
The exhibition continues in the spaces of the Strozzina
with artworks that continue Eliasson’s focus on perception and his exploration into the moiré effect.
Fivefold dodecahedron lamp (2006) consists of a dodecahedron that contains a highly reflective glass
tetrahedron, while Eye see you (2006) creates a slight moiré effect according
to the position and movement of the viewer. In addition, in the series City
Plan (2018), seven maps of the city, traced back to geometric shapes on
mirrors, reflect local newspapers replaced daily, to re-present considerations
on time, a main theme of the exhibition. Presented to the public for the first time, the new
artwork Your view matter (2022) uses VR technology to explore bodily perception
in the digital space. Donning a special headset, visitors enter a digital world comprising a series of six virtual spaces. Five of these
spaces each take the form of one of the Platonic solids – the tetrahedron,
octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and cube – while the sixth takes us
inside an immense sphere. Here, visitors can move about the spaces in virtual
reality, accompanied by a pulsing minimalist soundtrack created by the artist.
They can interact with the complex geometry from within by moving and looking
in all directions in what is a deeply experiential interaction. The walls and
ceilings – some of which are quite colourful, while others appear in stark
black and white – scintillate with ever-changing moirés. In the tetrahedron –
the first space that visitors encounter – the moiré arises as a result of the
resolution limits of the VR headset, reflecting the headset’s own noise and
drawing attention to the device. Since none of the moiré patterns are visible
unless the viewer moves, the artwork only emerges in the visitors’ perceptual apparatuses
through movement. Eliasson says “It’s a process of unlearning and relearning
how vision works,involving not only vision but also the movement of your head,
body, and brain.”
The exhibition, conceived by Studio Olafur Eliasson, is
promoted and organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. Main Supporter:
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi. Supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana,Camera
di Commercio di Firenze, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi and Intesa
Sanpaolo.
The countryard installation Under the weather (2022), has
been made possible thanks to the support of the Fondazione Hillary Merkus
Recordati within the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art programme.
Thanks to the support of Maria Manetti Shrem and Città
Metropolitana di Firenze.
The exhibition is produced in conjunction with the
Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea which will be hosting a
site-specific installation by the artist from 3rd November 2022.
BIOGRAPHY
Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) works with sculpture, painting, photography, film,
installation, and digital media. His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied
experience, and feelings of self and community. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the public through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and climate action.Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows have appeared in major museums around the globe. He represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project, an enormous artificial sun shrouded by mist, in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, which was seen by more than two million people. In 2014, Contact was the opening exhibition of Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Verklighetsmaskiner (Reality machines), at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2015, became the museum’s most visited show by a living artist. In 2016, Eliasson created a series of interventions for the palace and gardens of Versailles and mounted two large-scale exhibitions: Nothingness is not nothing at all, at Long Museum, Shanghai, and The parliament of possibilities, at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul. Eliasson’s site-specific installation Reality projector opened at the Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, in March 2018,
the same month as The unspeakable openness of things, his solo exhibition at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing. In 2019, In real life, a wide-ranging survey exhibition of Eliasson’s artistic practice over the past twenty-five years, opened at Tate Modern, in London, before travelling to Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020. Olafur Eliasson: Symbiotic seeing opened at Kunsthaus Zürich in January 2020, and Sometimes the river is the bridge was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from April to September 2020. For the exhibition Life, in 2021, Eliasson removed the glass facade of the Fondation Beyeler, in Basel, Switzerland, and conducted the bright green waters of the existing pond into the museum’s galleries, along with a host of aquatic plants and the odd duck or spider.
Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftsmen, architects, archivists,
researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians
///////////////////
Supporters
Comune di Firenze,
Regione Toscana, Camera di Commercio di
Firenze, Intesa
Sanpaolo, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi,
With the support
of Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, Maria Manetti Shrem, Città
Metropolitana di
Firenze
Technical sponsors
Trenitalia, laFeltrinelli, Ufficio Turismo Città Metropolitana di
Firenze, Unicoop
Firenze, Rinascente, Mercato Centrale Firenze,
Destination
Florence Convention & Visitors Bureau, Publiacqua
Press Office
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi:
Lavinia Rinaldi T.
+39 338 5277132 l.rinaldi@palazzostrozzi.org
Sutton: Fiona
Russell fiona@suttoncomms.com
Communication and
Promotion Susanna Holm – Sigma CSC T. +39 055 2478436
susannaholm@cscsigma.it
Catalogue Marsilio
Arte
Info and
Reservations T. +39 055 2645155
prenotazioni@palazzostrozzi.org
Hours and
admission www.palazzostrozzi.org
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