Olafur Eliasson Will Present His Largest Solo Exhibition in Italy to Date
An immersive series of installations that will reawaken visitors perception to the Renaissance-style building.
Olafur Eliasson is set to unveil his largest exhibition in Italy to date with a new show titled Nel tuo tempo (In your time) at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence.
Mapped across the space are new and existing artwork that were created to complement the Renaissance-style architecture of the historic building. “Nel tuo tempo is a meeting-up of artworks, visitors, and the Palazzo Strozzi itself,” said Eliasson in a statement.
“This extraordinary Renaissance building has travelled through the centuries to greet us here, now, in the 21st 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,” he added.
Like much of his oeuvre, perception is at the heart of each installation, such as Under the weather (2022) — a site-specific elliptical structure that hangs in the courtyard. As visitors move about the space, the artwork produces a moiré effect, which destabilizes the viewers perception of Palazzo Strozzi’s strict orthogonal architecture, challenging its stable, unchanging historical structure. This exchange between viewer and artwork will be unique to each individual and the ellipse will only appear circular at specific vantage points.
Further into the palace itself, each room has been specially designed to distort users’ perception through a careful use of color, light and shadow. Similar to Eliasson’s seminal The weather project (2003) at Tate Modern, How do we live together (2019) creates an illusion by bissecting the room in half through a mirror affixed to the ceiling.
For the first time, Eliasson will also debut Your view matter (2022), which uses VR technology to explore bodily perception in the digital space. Visitors will be given special headsets that cast them into a digital world comprised of six unique settings — five of which take the form of one of the Platonic solids – the tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and cube – while the sixth is set in an immense sphere.
In the first sphere, the tetrahedron, viewers encounter a moiré effect due to the limitation of the VR headset and hear noise from the device, as a result. None of the moiré patterns activate unless the viewer moves — a process that Eliasson equated to “unlearning and relearning how vision works, involving not only vision but also the movement of your head, body, and brain.”
Curated by Arturo Galansino, Nel tuo tempo (In your time) will open at Palazzo Strozzi on September 22 and run until January 22, 2023.
For more on art, a Gaza farmer accidentally unearthed a well-preserved Byzantine mosaic.
Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza degli Strozzi
50123 Florence, Italy
