Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by Olafur Eliasson, whose large-scale immersive environments, installations, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Iceland, at the same time as they foreground the sensory experience of the work itself.
Drawing from public and private collections worldwide, the exhibition will include 34 works that explore Eliasson's diverse range of artistic production from 1991 to the present, including six new works created specifically for The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Eliasson recontextualizes elements such as light, water, ice, fog, stone, and moss to create unique situations that shift the viewer's perception of place and self. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life. The exhibition will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art and at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from April 20 through June 30, 2008.
The exhibition is organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, former Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where the exhibition originated and where it will remain on view through February 24, 2008. In New York, it is coordinated and expanded by Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media; and Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art.
MoMA and P.S.1's presentation of Take your time will include many of the works shown at SFMOMA as well as 20 additional works. The new works for the MoMA and P.S.1 exhibition are Take your time, The natural light setup, Mirror door (observer), Mirror door (user), Mirror door (spectator), and Mirror door (visitor). Take your time (2008), which will be on view at P.S.1, comprises a large, circular mirror that is affixed to the ceiling and rotates slowly on its axis, destabilizing viewers' perception of space as they pass underneath it. The natural light setup (2008), also at P.S.1, is a light box emitting a bright, white glow from the combination of all the colors in the visible light spectrum. Mirror door (observer), Mirror door (user), Mirror door (spectator), and Mirror door (visitor) (all 2008) will be presented in slightly different iterations at both MoMA and P.S.1. These works comprise several spotlights projecting onto rectangular mirror doors to create pools of light on the gallery floor.
Other major works in the exhibition include Moss wall (1994), an installation of live reindeer moss that will naturally change color throughout its time on view in MoMA's third-floor Special Exhibitions Gallery, and Ventilator (1997), an electric fan suspended from the ceiling of MoMA's Donald C. and Catherine Marron Atrium, which soars 110 feet above street level. The fan will swing above the heads of visitors in ever-changing arcs—a striking representation of unpredictable movement through space.
At P.S.1, installed in the downstairs Duplex gallery, Reversed waterfall (1998) consists of a large, four-tiered scaffolding, with fonts on each level that direct water upwards, reversing its gravitational flow. Reversed waterfall, an early example of Eliasson's experiments in this format, will remain on view at P.S.1 through September. -- www.moma.org
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