Nel Tuo Tempo (In your time), Olafur Eliasson’s largest exhibition in Italy to date, opened to audiences in Florence today, unveiling a major new site-specific courtyard installation that uses the moiré effect to create a unique visual experience for every visitor.
Nel tuo tempo is a meeting-up of artworks, visitors, and the Palazzo Strozzi itself. This extraordinary Renaissance building has travelled through the centuries to greet us here, now, in the twenty-first century not as a mere host for art but as a co-producer of the exhibition. Yet it is not only the Palazzo Strozzi that has travelled across time. As visitors, you too have travelled – each mind-body different from the others. On individual journeys – with diverse backgrounds and experiences, we meet up in the here and now of the exhibition.
Olafur Eliasson
Featuring a number of new, site-specific works, the exhibition embraces the Palazzo Strozzi’s Renaissance architecture in creating a powerful series of immaterial artworks that address subjective perception and shared experience. The exhibition brings together new and older works that feature light, shadows, reflections, patterns, and intense colour, and includes new digital artwork created using VR technology – presented to the public for the first time at Palazzo Strozzi.
Curated by Arturo Galansino, the exhibition is the result of the artist’s direct interaction with the spaces of Palazzo Strozzi whose historical and symbolic architecture he rethinks with installations built around the visitor who becomes an integral part of the artwork. Eliasson has taken inspiration from the Palazzo Strozzi’s history as a centre for the study of Humanism (a philosophy that sits at the intersection of art and science), creating a pathway through each space that combines new installations and some historic work that subvert and refract perceptions of the space, and encourage the visitor to perceive the building with a new perspective.
Moving beyond the borders and physical limits of a space, Nel tuo tempo (In your time) calls into question the distinction between reality, perception and depiction.
Olafur Eliasson: Nel tuo tempo, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, 22nd September 2022-22nd January 2023
About the artist
Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) works with sculpture, painting, photography, film,
installation, and digital media. His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied
experience, and feelings of self and community. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the public through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policymaking, and climate action.
Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows have appeared in major museums around the globe. He represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project, an enormous artificial sun shrouded by mist, in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, which was seen by more than two million people. In 2014, Contact was the opening exhibition of Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Verklighetsmaskiner (Reality machines), at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2015, became the museum’s most visited show by a living artist. In 2016, Eliasson created a series of interventions for the palace and gardens of Versailles and mounted two large-scale exhibitions: Nothingness is not nothing at all, at Long Museum, Shanghai, and The parliament of possibilities, at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul. Eliasson’s site-specific installation Reality projector opened at the Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, in March 2018, the same month as The unspeakable openness of things, his solo exhibition at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing.
In 2019, In real life, a wide-ranging survey exhibition of Eliasson’s artistic practice over the past twenty-five
years, opened at Tate Modern, in London, before travelling to Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020. Olafur
Eliasson: Symbiotic seeing opened at Kunsthaus Zürich in January 2020, and Sometimes the river is the
bridge was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from April to September 2020. For the
exhibition Life, in 2021, Eliasson removed the glass facade of the Fondation Beyeler, in Basel, Switzerland,
and conducted the bright green waters of the existing pond into the museum’s galleries, along with a host of aquatic plants and the odd duck or spider.
Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftsmen, architects, archivists,
researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians.
