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Olafur Eliasson opens largest exhibition to date in Italy

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.

Olafur Eliasson Room for one colour, 1997 monofrequency lamps Dimensions variable © 1997 Olafur Eliasson Angsuvarnsiri Collection Installation view: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2009 Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson Photo: Anders Sune Berg
Olafur Eliasson Room for one colour, 1997 monofrequency lamps Dimensions variable © 1997 Olafur Eliasson Angsuvarnsiri Collection Installation view: 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan, 2009 Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson Photo: Anders Sune Berg

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
Olafur Eliasson Eye see you, 2006 stainless steel, aluminium, colour-effect filter glass, monofrequency light ø 120 cm, 230 x 120 x 110 cm AP I Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles Photo: Christian Uchtmann / Studio Olafur Eliasson Commissioned by: Louis Vuitton Malletier © 2006 Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson Eye see you, 2006 stainless steel, aluminium, colour-effect filter glass, monofrequency light ø 120 cm, 230 x 120 x 110 cm AP I Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles Photo: Christian Uchtmann / Studio Olafur Eliasson Commissioned by: Louis Vuitton Malletier © 2006 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.

Olafur Eliasson, Under the Weather, 2022, Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, and of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, © 2022 Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson, Under the Weather, 2022, Photo: Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, and of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, © 2022 Olafur Eliasson

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 Firefly double-polyhedron sphere experiment, 2020 stainless steel, colour-effect filter glass (green, orange, yellow, cyan, pink), glass mirror, LED light, motor, paint (black) ø 170 cm © 2020 Olafur Eliasson Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles Photo: Jens Ziehe © 2020 Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson Firefly double-polyhedron sphere experiment, 2020 stainless steel, colour-effect filter glass (green, orange, yellow, cyan, pink), glass mirror, LED light, motor, paint (black) ø 170 cm © 2020 Olafur Eliasson Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles Photo: Jens Ziehe © 2020 Olafur Eliasson

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.

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