Olafur Eliasson
The listening dimension
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
New York, 521 W 21st St #1
Sky is the limit for Olafur Eliasson, the Danish artist who has installed massive scale public artworks around the globe with enormous budgets, orchestrating a composition of artistic spirit and technical precision. Take, for example, his 2008 Public Art Fund commission The New York City Waterfall that absorbed water from the East River, escalated it ten stories above the surface and poured it back within a system built under the Brooklyn Bridge, inserting a man-made waterfall into the concrete jungle. For an artist who usually works at such grand scale, gallery exhibitions usually offer intimate and serene affairs that give the audience an opportunity to experience the work firsthand. Therefore, The listening dimension, Eliasson’s ninth exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery suggests to “heighten the viewer’s perceptual awareness and encourage self-reflection.”
Olafur ELIASSON Installation view of The listening dimension, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, March 23–April 22,2017. Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Olafur ELIASSON Installation view of The listening dimension, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, March 23–April 22,2017. Photo: Maris Hutchinson Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Starting with the gallery foyer and expanding up to the second floor, the exhibition immerses the viewer into a sensory journey in which basic acts such hearing and seeing become vessels for contemplation and introspection. The main gallery presents a mirror-filled installation in which the viewers will find themselves within a chaotic harmony and a riveting architectural structure. The second floor gallery gives space to the artist’s considerably modest scale work in painting and sculpture, presenting different bodies work the artist created in the last two years, such as 2015’s Colour experiment no. 78, a large grid composed of seventy-two paintings.
“You have an idea… an intuition, a feeling, a subconscious thing. It comes in many versions, but when it does it is sometimes better to go back and ask where it came from than to immediately decide where it is about to go. If you know where it came from, you might know why you had it, and once you know why, it’s easier to know how. The brush or the pencil: they’re just tools. The playing, the fooling around; you need to step out of the macho-driven goal-orientated brutality of today’s success criteria,” noted the artist in a 2015 interview with Rachel Cooke on The Guardian about the transition process of his ideas into work.
The exhibition runs through April 22, 2017.
