OLAFUR ELIASSON
NOTHINGNESS IS NOT NOTHING AT ALL
Long Museum
Pudong District, No.210, Lane 2255, Luoshan Road - Shanghai
20/3/2016 - 19/6/2016
The Long Museum, Shanghai, is pleased
to announce the first survey exhibition of the work of world-renowned Danish
Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in a Chinese museum: Nothingness is not nothing
at all. Opening to the public on March 20, 2016, the career-spanning exhibition
brings together artworks from the artist’s vast oeuvre, which extends from the
early 1990s to the present and includes installations, sculptures, paintings,
drawings, and film. A number of new artworks were conceived especially for the
Long Museum exhibition, including the large-scale, site-specific installation
The open pyramid (2016).
Ms. Wang Wei, co-founder and chief curator of
Long Museum, says:
“Olafur Eliasson is one of the most representative and
influential artists working today, and I am highly impressed by the diversity of
themes and great artistic tensions in his work. When Long Museum West Bund was
still under construction, Eliasson spent a long time visiting the site, and this
enthusiastic visit became the seed for the exhibition at Long Museum. I see
Eliasson as an artist with the brain of a scientist. His works reflect on nature
and also demonstrate a lively, interested engagement in daily experience; he
possesses an astonishing ability to activate space. I also see Eliasson’s work
as creating not merely single objects but rather overall experiences. His works
invite visitors to enter his artistic world, and inspire their inner senses. I
hope that bringing Eliasson’s artworks to the Long Museum will give a fresh life
to the space, and allow the Chinese public to have an opportunity to see these
world-renowned artworks locally, in Shanghai.”
Olafur Eliasson
says:
“I wanted to amplify the feeling of the cavernous museum galleries by
installing artworks that invite visitors to look inwards, to question how their
senses work, and dream up utopias for everyday life. Reality is what we make it
to be—it is what we see, sense, think, feel, and do. It is also what things,
artworks, spaces, and cities do to us. Art challenges our perspective on the
world, turns it upside down, or suggests alternative views—I hope visitors to
the exhibition will be inspired to undertake such enquiries. I see the
questioning of what is as an opportunity. It makes that which we take for
granted negotiable, open to change.”
Through a diverse array of
artworks, many of which suggest tools for experimental research, the exhibition
invites visitors into a space of exploration that encourages their active
engagement. The artworks were selected and arranged with particular attention to
how they interact with the vaulted, austere concrete museum building designed by
Atelier Deshaus. Inspired by the architecture’s combination of rectangular rooms
and curved ceilings, Eliasson chose artworks for the exhibition that use basic
geometrical principles such as circles, spheres, cubes, or pyramids.
Pavilion-like structures create discrete stations within the building, and the
capacious interior is divided into individual spaces through precisely curated
constellations of artworks.
Many of the works include elemental materials
such as stone, ice, water, or light. Series of photographs and colour paintings
reflect Eliasson’s approach to studying the phenomenon of colour perception and
investigating the world. Optical devices, lenses, mirrors, and glass spheres
emphasise the dynamism and subjectivity of visual perception, providing
opportunities for visitors to consider their own participation in the
construction of what they see. The works direct the viewers’ attention towards
the space they inhabit as well as to the act of perceiving it, highlighting
their active role in the discovery and co-creation of their surroundings and the
world
