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290713: Lentos Museum Linz - Olafur Eliasson
Lentos Museum Linz
Olafur Eliasson
28.06.2013 – 22.09.2013
Artificial sun and a room full of colours
By Hannah Winkelbauer
Viennese know Olafur Eliasson's work, "Yellow Fog": to some the installation at the corner of the Heidenschuß/Am Hof indicates a fire with smoke formation, water damage or a clean-up operation. Tourists and locals are torn for a moment out of their inner city rut by the rising, yellow fog shown daily at twilight – they marvel and pause for a moment.
Eliasson, a Dane born in Iceland and who lives in Berlin, deals with physical phenomena in his art, with light, water and weather. In 2003/4, in the turbine hall of London's Tate Modern, he brought the weather into the museum with the "Weather Project". This installation of an artificial sun and fog constructed the illusion of a sunset.
A work by Eliasson, which has to do with the sun, is now presented in the Linz Lentos. Together with the engineer, Frederik Ottesen, also a Dane, Eliasson developed small solar lamps for the project "Little Suns". The design of the lamps created from robust synthetic materials is reminiscent of sunflowers or "Little Suns". Charged in the sunlight for five hours, the appliances still give off light for five hours in the darkness. The small wonders should make it possible for children in areas without electricity to be able to do their homework even after the sun has set or to read without being subjected to the toxic gases emitted by other light sources. However, the lamps are not sent to Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi and Zimbabwe as handouts. Eliasson and Ottesen deliberately decided to sell the "Little Suns" cheaply to people who would then be able to sell them again in their area, thereby getting an income.
To what extent the project falls under the category of "art" is anyone's guess. In July 2012, Eliasson himself argued in an interview with the FAZ that the "Little Suns" are indeed art because he, as an artist, is only interested in art and only creates art. The explanation on his website sounds somewhat more plausible, that the art of the "Little Suns" are those things which were made possible through them and their light.
The documentation of the "Little Suns" project is only the encore to the installation in the main hall of the Lentos. In the no longer recognizable hall on whose white walls many large and small format pictures normally hang, visitors now plunge into a sort of rainbow in the dark. The mighty light installation, "Sua fogueira cósmica/Your Curious Camp Fire" (2011) in the darkened, black surrounding is captivating. A projector lets pink, violet, blue, green and yellow stripes drift along the walls. The stripes pass by, become broader and then narrower. One is tempted to run after one's favourite colours, they often then disappear at the exact moment when one arrives at the other end of the hall.
An event hall and a documentation of a social art project – as different as the two exhibited works by Olafur Eliasson are in the Lentos, the connecting element of light remains. Worth seeing, above all, are the short films that, in conjunction with the "Little Suns" project, were made by 18 filmmakers at the behest of Olafur Eliasson and are also shown in the Lentos.
Lentos Art Museum Linz
4020 Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promendade 1
Tel: +43 70 7070 36 00
E-mail: info@lentos.at
http://www.lentos.at
Opening hours: daily, excluding Mondays, from 10-18 hours, Thu 10-21 hours
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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290713
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz
4020 Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promendade 1
Tel: +43 70 7070 36 00
Email: info@lentos.at
http://www.lentos.at
Öffnungszeiten: täglich außer Mo 10-18 Uhr, Do 10-21 Uhr
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz
4020 Linz, Ernst-Koref-Promendade 1
Tel: +43 70 7070 36 00
Email: info@lentos.at
http://www.lentos.at
Öffnungszeiten: täglich außer Mo 10-18 Uhr, Do 10-21 Uhr
