Olafur Eliasson
Nel tuo tempo

The exhibition begins with Under the weather (2022), a site-specific artwork for the public space of Palazzo Strozzi’s courtyard that comprises a large elliptical structure over 10 metres tall and suspended 8 metres above the ground. The installation conjures a moiré effect, which destabilises the viewers’ perception of Palazzo Strozzi’s strict orthogonal architecture, challenging its stable, unchanging historical structure. This installation has been made possible thanks to the support of the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati within the Palazzo Strozzi Future Art programme.

Visitors move from the courtyard into the Palazzo, where they discover Eliasson’s direct dialogue with the architecture, which he interrogates through adding artificial lights, fleeting shadows, reflections, moiré effects and intense colours. Far from being simply a vessel or a backdrop, the building becomes a co-producer of the artworks, a creative tool in interacting with visitors’ perception.

The exhibition continues in the spaces of the Strozzina through works that continue the reflection between space, time and perception. The protagonist of the Strozzina installation is a new work by the artist Your view matter (2022), a new artwork using VR technology. Donning a special headset, visitors enter a digital world comprising a series of six virtual spaces. Five of these spaces each take the form of one of the Platonic solids – the tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and cube – while the sixth takes us inside an immense sphere.

Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson 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, policy-making, 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 Fondation 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.

The exhibition is produced in conjunction with the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea which will be hosting a site-specific installation by the artist from November 3rd, 2022.

The exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Nel tuo tempo is conceived by Studio Olafur Eliasson and promoted and organised by the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi.

Main Supporter: Fondazione CR Firenze. Supporters: Comune di Firenze, Regione Toscana, Camera di Commercio di Firenze, Comitato dei Partner di Palazzo Strozzi and Intesa Sanpaolo.

With the support of the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati, Maria Manetti Shrem.

Cover: Olafur Eliasson, Firefly double-polyhedron sphere experiment, 2020. Photo: Jens Ziehe. Courtesy of the artist; neugerriemschneider, Berlin; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. © 2020 Olafur Eliasson