'Space minding'
Olafur Eliasson at STEVENSON in Cape TownSTEVENSON is pleased to present 'Space Minding', the first solo exhibition by Olafur Eliasson to take place in South Africa.
Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation artworks that employ elemental materials such as light, water and earth. In 1997, he participated in the second Johannesburg Biennale with the urban intervention 'Erosion', in which he turned a water reservoir into a running stream that stretched 1.5 kilometres through the city.
At Stevenson, Eliasson will present a group of works focused on light. Mono scanner (2004) consists of a cylindrical Fresnel lens, mounted horizontally on a rotating pedestal, which casts a single, narrow beam of light onto the floor, walls and ceiling of a room. As the lens rotates around the horizontal axis, the vertically oriented band of light sweeps slowly across the surfaces of the room, giving the impression that the band of light is emitted from the lens not as a disc but in the shape of the room's rectangular cross-section. A single rotation takes approximately one minute and 30 seconds.
In a second room, he will exhibit works from his Polar fall fade series: each consists of three coloured glass panes, supported on a wall rack, with a different elliptical cut-out in each pane. The overlapping ellipses create a variety of colour saturations and tones. Hand-blown by artisans in one of the few remaining glassworks capable of producing sheets of this quality and size, the glass exhibits visible bubbles and variations throughout. The works extend the artist's interest in creating pigments and visual effects through the superimposition of coloured, transparent layers. The visitor oscillates between viewing the piece head-on, gaining the complete colour spectrum of the combined panes, and from the side, revealing the depth and construction of the layers. In this oscillation, the focus fades from the colours to the objects that produce them and then back to the colours.
Eliasson was born in 1967 and lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin. He grew up in Iceland and Denmark and studied, from 1989 to 1995, at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today encompasses some 75 craftsmen, specialised technicians, architects, archivists, administrators, programmers, art historians and cooks. Since the mid-1990s, Eliasson has realised numerous major exhibitions and projects around the world.
22 January - 28 February
