Olafur Eliasson: Your psychoacoustic light ensemble: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson from October 24 to December 19, 2024. The exhibition will comprise two new groups of light installations, as well as a series of recent watercolors. All of the works draw on Eliasson’s continued interest in color phenomena and the relativity of our perception, themes that for Eliasson emphasize how our experiences of the world are highly individual, context-dependent, and subject to change.
The first group of light installations, found in the ground floor gallery space, translates audio waves into visual phenomena. Exploring the peripheries of our perception, Eliasson employs low-frequency vibrations to create a spatial soundscape that is felt and seen, as well as heard. On the wall of a darkened room, circles of light fade in and out as deep drones fill the air with subtle dissonances. The circles quiver in reaction to the sounds, and ripples of light crisscross the glowing discs. The light is used to visualize the soundwaves, resulting in projected circles so that the sound thus becomes visible, inviting viewers to "see" themselves hearing.
As early as the turn of the nineteenth century, the physicist Ernst Chladni had observed the regular, symmetrical shapes that occur when a metal plate covered with sand is vibrated by a violin bow. Typically, those experiments focused on pure tones, which result in surprisingly symmetrical and consistent shapes. Eliasson’s artwork, in contrast, aims to disrupt these regular patterns and explore the possibilities of combining a range of tones and overlaying projections to produce unexpected, organic shapes. The projections make the tones explicit, physically felt. They allow you to see sound and hear the light, to see yourself hearing.
On the second floor, another projection work employ prisms and LEDs to conjure a rainbow on the wall of the darkened space. The mechanisms used to create the artwork are displayed openly in the gallery, like instruments in a science experiment. The size and shape of the projection, as well as the proportion of the different colors within the rainbow, depend upon the distances between mirrors, prisms, and light sources and on the geometry of the prisms themselves.
In the main skylit gallery, also on the second floor, the artist presents large watercolor works that conjure the evanescent luminosity of a rainbow on paper. The illusion of light, long a desiderata of painters in Western art history, is here the result of applying thin, translucent layers of pigment in succession to sheets of moistened paper. These works continue Eliasson’s investigation of color phenomena, a central concern for much of his work across all media, from large-scale installations to photographs, sculptures, and light projections. The artist is fascinated by the relativity of color perception, by the fact that how we see colors is extremely individual and dependent upon context. ‘Color’, he writes, ‘does not exist in itself but only when looked at. The unique fact that color only materializes when light bounces off a surface onto our retinas shows us that the analysis of colors is, in fact, about the ability to analyze ourselves.’
Currently Eliasson has a major solo show at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, titled Olafur Eliasson: OPEN. Presented as part of the Getty initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide, this exhibition will be on view at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA through July 6, 2025. Olafur Eliasson: Your unexpected encounter is on view at the Istanbul Modern through February 9, 2025. And finally, Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey represents the artist’s first major touring survey through the Asia Pacific region, originating at the Singapore Art Museum (May 10—September 22, 2024) and touring to Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand (December 7, 2024—March 23, 2025); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (June 22—September 21, 2025); Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia (November 2025—April 2026); and the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila, the Philippines (June—October 2026).
Image: Olafur Eliasson, work in progress of a new artwork, 2024, for the upcoming solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson © 2024 Olafur Eliasson
