Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque

Belvedere and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) are pleased to announce their upcoming exhibition with the Danish Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. Conceived by Francesca von Habsburg in collaboration with Agnes Husslein, Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque is an ambitious venture that brings together and reconnects some of Eliasson’s most distinguished works from the holdings of TBA21 and the Juan and Patricia Vergez Collection. The overview of artworks from two decades of Eliasson’s artistic practice will explore the affinities between his work and the extraordinary baroque setting of the Belvedere’s Winter Palace – the former city residence of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736), a major military leader and patron of the arts and sciences in baroque Vienna.

Alongside these works, new site-specific interventions will activate and articulate the historical ensemble, establishing a dialogue between the volubility of the baroque architecture and the modulating perception provided by Eliasson’s artworks. The resulting encounter between artworks, aesthetics, and worldviews from two vastly different epochs challenges viewers’ habits of perception and proposes that reality can be understood as unstable and evolving, as a process of constant negotiation. Surprising affinities between Eliasson’s works and their temporary settings become evident; the juxtapositions explore the relationships between object and viewer, representation and experience, actual and virtual, giving rise in turn to a concept of the baroque superimposed on itself – the Baroque Baroque.

Eliasson says, “I find it inspiring that the baroque exhibited such confidence in the fluidity of the boundaries between models of reality and, simply, reality. The presentation of my works at the Winter Palace is based on trust in the possibility of constructing reality according to our shared dreams and desires and on faith in the idea that constructions and models are as real as anything.”

TBA21 Founder, Francesca von Habsburg says: “This exhibition brings together several elements that I think support the vision of collectors and their responsibility as well as their ability to create art projects that defy traditional categorization. Both Patricia and Juan Vergez and I have been collecting and supporting Olafur Eliasson for many years with great enthusiasm, as he is indeed a renaissance man of many talents! In this presentation we wanted to introduce a parallel, that Olafur himself has mirrored in the exhibition rooms, that juxtaposes the precious Baroque cultural heritage of Vienna with the work of an artist that I feel very close to.”

Over the last decades, Eliasson has probed the cognitive and cultural aspects of seeing, stressing the relativity of reality. Transcending the confines of art, his heterogeneous, thought-provoking body of work ranges from discrete interventions to large-scale installations and employs diverse frames of reference from the natural sciences, psychology, and philosophy to challenge the normative and internalized ways in which we perceive our surroundings. In works that make use of motion, projections, shadows, and reflections, Eliasson renders visible the elliptical relationships between body, perception, and representation. Ephemeral materials—including light, reflections, water, wave patterns, and air—are brought into conversation with the spaces of the exhibition and with viewers, who become protagonists of the engaging scenarios.

Eliasson plays elegantly with visual illusion, with the liminal and the ephemeral, and with the material and the immaterial, using extroversion and introspection to resonate with cosmological ideas; his works relate strongly to notions of transformation and artifice inherent in the concept of the baroque. As an epoch of great turmoil, the baroque saw revolutionary optical and scientific discoveries as well as a blossoming of interest in the phantasmagoric and the occult. The baroque is here understood as a prolific process of constant reformulation; the tension between light and dark, knowledge and speculation, and rationality and spirituality opens up unexpected, “other” spaces of potentiality and transformation. The commissioner and original inhabitant of the Winter Palace, Prince Eugene of Savoy, was a visionary with magnificent taste and unrivaled interests in architecture, design, and art that were matched by his passion for the sciences, including mineralogy and astronomy.

While emphasizing the way spaces are constructed by history and tradition, Eliasson’s works address the viewer in her embodied experience. Through the use of projections, shadows, and reflections, the artworks foreground the relationship between body, perception, and image, anchoring agency in the body and mind in motion; they invite the viewer’s active engagement by mirroring, fragmenting, and inverting her position within space. In the entrance vestibule the light installation Die organische und kristalline Beschreibung (1996) floods the walls, floor, and ceiling with swelling washes of blue and yellow light, an ocean of color that loosens the viewer’s sense of the stability of her environment. In Yellow corridor, monofrequency light is used to heighten the precariousness of our relationship to visible space. Eliasson’s optical machines and installations – such as Kaleidoscope, New Berlin Sphere (2009), Your spiral view (2002), Your welcome reflected (2003), and Seu planeta compartilhado (Your shared planet, 2011) – reflect the artist’s ongoing investigations of color, perception, transformation, and deconstruction, an inquiry that is particularly interesting in relation to the baroque context. A sitespecific intervention in the form of a continuous mirror traversing the enfilade of grand rooms further disorients the viewer by folding and re-folding the complex spaces it divides. The new commission Wishes versus wonders (2015), a steel half-ring mounted to the mirror wall in the Hall of Battle Paintings stages an encounter between reality, illusion, and the elaborate artifice of the surroundings, simultaneously multiplying lines of potentiality.

Within this terrain of doubling and paradox, Eliasson calls into question our received habits of seeing and experiencing space; his artworks make us wonder and reconsider, giving meaning to the enigmatic doubling inherent in Baroque Baroque.