Kaleidoscope Body by Beatrice Brandini
Olafur Eliasson: Colour spectrum kaleidoscope, 2003
The Palazzo Strozzi Foundation presents In your time, the largest exhibition by Olafur Eliasson ever held in Italy. With lights and colors, shadows and reflections, the Icelandic – Danish artist interacts with the majesty of Palazzo Strozzi.
Exhibition banner
Arturo Galansino and Olafur Eliasson at the press conference
The exhibition, which opens today until January 2023, is curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Foundation, and is the result of the artist’s direct work on the spaces of Palazzo Strozzi, such as the monumental site-specific installation Under the weather in the entrance courtyard.
Olafur Eliasson: Firefly double-polyhedron, 2020
Olafur Eliasson: Firefly double-polyhedron, 2020 (particular)
The Renaissance palace, one of the most beautiful in the world, becomes the ideal setting for Eliasson, a non-passive space, where windows, ceilings, corners and walls interact with the artist’s works, in a game of mirrors and colored filters, in which the viewer reflects, with a new awareness, on the perception that each of us has of space.
Eliasson works on all the rooms of Palazzo Strozzi, from the courtyard to the Piano Nobile, to the Strozzina, characterizing the visitor’s path of three elements, color, water and light.
Olafur Eliasson: Room for one color, 1997
Olafur Eliasson:Triple window, 1999
Original and visionary artist, but also attentive to environmental and ethical issues, Eliasson is a painter, sculptor, photographer, videomaker…, a guest in the most important museums in the world. Just like Renaissance artists, who were good in any field, tried to try their hand, even Olafur cannot be defined with a single adjective, but he is a curious and multifaceted artist, whose greatest urgency is perhaps precisely that of experimenting.
Olafur Eliasson: Solar compression, 2016
Olafur makes us reflect on the way in which we relate to the world, offering us some cognitive tools to raise awareness of our behavior towards the environment, as in Riverbed of 2014 at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, in which the visitor was suddenly dropped into a rocky natural landscape, across a watercourse.
Olafur Eliasson: Colour spectrum kaleidoscope, 2003
View of one of the rooms of the exhibition Olafur Eliasson IN THIS TIME
His studio, based in Berlin, brings together craftsmen, architects, researchers, administrators, art historians and cooks in a sort of factory.
In this exhibition, immersed in a parallel reality, visitors can move around these places in what we could define as a real journey through time, bringing with them memories, perceptions. The works that the artist has created for this imposing place “intrude” with their artificial lights, shadows and reflections. Like Under the weather consisting of a large suspended elliptical structure that seems to change and vibrate according to how we move in space, essentially creating a real game of visual interference.
Under the weather (20022) opera site specific by Olafur Eliasson
Under the weather (20022) opera site specific by Olafur Eliasson
Already in the Renaissance Florence was wondering about the meaning of light; artists such as Beato Angelico and Piero della Francesca are “painters of light”. And light like the one that characterizes a clear cloudless sky, we need it infinitely.
Olafur Eliasson, photo Lars Borges
Good life to everyone!
Beatrice