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25/5/2004

Olafur Eliasson

Menil Collection, Houston

Photographs
May 26, 2004 — September 5, 2004

Since his emergence in the late 1980s, Olafur Eliasson has earned an international reputation as one of contemporary art's most versatile and peripatetic talents. At once a sculptor, installation artist, and photographer, Eliasson is noted for elegant, meditative projects that turn immaterial sensations such as temperature, smell, taste, air, and magnetic waves into sculptural objects or environments. At the core of his enterprise lies an ongoing engagement with the medium of photography, whose ability to convey the experience of natural phenomena using light and light-sensitive materials echoes the artist's own transformation of the ephemeral into the material.

While his photographic practice is well regarded, largely in small publications and commercial gallery exhibitions, 'Olafur Eliasson: Photographs' is the first museum exhibition ever to focus on this particular aspect of his career. Comprising approximately seventy works, the show includes the artist's earliest photo-grid projects, many of which were shown only once at the time of their creation and have never been seen in the United States. The exhibition concludes with the artist's most recent endeavors in the medium, which belie a greater sophistication in both composition and execution. In its entirety, 'Olafur Eliasson: Photographs' offers a probing, comprehensive overview of a critical, yet heretofore marginalized aspect of Eliasson's creative output.

Ranging from the years 1993 to 2003, the thirty-five or so photography projects within this exhibition reveal Eliasson's ever-evolving investigations into what he calls 'the discrepancy between the experience of seeing and the knowledge or expectation of what we are seeing.' Among his early documentary projects of note is Looking for hot water on Gunner's Island (1995), composed of twenty-four color photographs capturing indistinct figures and footprints that are floating within a disconsolate blue fog. Characteristic of almost all of his photo series, the work is installed in a nonhierarchical grid pattern. Grids such as The earthquake series (2000), composed of sixteen images of an earthquake's aftermath, or The aerial river series (2000), composed of forty-two images that trace the entire length of a single river as it winds down a mountain, are representative of many of his later works, which have a more complex narrative dimension.

Eliasson spends several months each year in Iceland, where he undertakes an ongoing visual documentary of its natural and cultural formations—roads, empty warehouses, fog, caves, islands, rivers, and so on—all recorded in a seemingly unfrequented landscape. In this exhibition, thirty-six of the Untitled (Iceland series) photographs, taken between the years 1998 and 2001, are installed together as a group for the first time since he began the series. Interestingly, the series is characterized by both singularity and conformity: although each individual photograph records the details and textures of a particular object or place, when they are arranged as a group, common formal aspects such as equality of scale and shapes become evident.

Museum Hours:
Wednesday – Sunday, 11:00 am to 7:00 pm

Image:
Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967)
The lighthouse series, 1999
20 color photographs
Overall: 60 3/4 x 67 3/4 inches
Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Menil
1515 Sul Ross
Houston, Texas 77006
Tel: 713-525-9400
Fax: 713-525-9444

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