Olafur Eliasson: The listening dimension: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is very pleased to announce its ninth solo exhibition with world-renowned artist Olafur Eliasson, The  listening  dimension, on view March 23 through April 22, 2017. Over the past two decades,  Eliasson has developed an immensely rich, curious and complex practice at the intersection of aesthetics, science and ecology. In his first solo presentation in New York since 2012, Eliasson will transform the gallery’s exhibition space, across both floors, with a new body of work that explores light, vision and movement, heightening the viewer’s perceptual awareness and encouraging self-reflection.

Eliasson says: “The listening dimension emerged against the backdrop of the 2016 US elections. At a time when oversimplification is everywhere, I believe that art can play an important role in creating aesthetic experiences that are both open and complex. Today, in politics, we are bombarded with emotional appeals, often linked to simplistic, polarizing, populist ideas. The arts and culture, on the other hand, provide spaces in which people can disagree and still be together, where they can share individual and collective experiences that are ambiguous and negotiable. At its best, art is an exercise in democracy; it trains our critical capacities for perceiving and interpreting the world. Yet art does not tell us what to do or how to feel, but rather empowers us to find out for ourselves.”

The works in this exhibition depend upon the viewers to co-produce the aesthetic experience, as they are only wholly perceivable when one moves around them. Thus they call our attention to the ways in which we interpret the world. Upon entering the gallery foyer the viewer encounters Rainbow bridge (2017), a series of crystal spheres placed on a steel structure in a range of colors that shift and change as she progresses past and around the sculpture.
 

In the main gallery space, an expansive installation presents vast mirror surfaces and curving forms that immerse the viewer in a disorienting environment. On each wall, one to three large rings appear to hover in space. As the viewer moves around the room, the construction is revealed and the rings disclose themselves as semicircular tubes mounted to a mirror. Completed by their reflections, the semi-circular elements produce virtual rings that traverse the boundary between actual and reflected space. Titled The listening dimension  (orbit 1, orbit 2, and orbit 3) (2017), the installation reinforces Eliasson’s insistence on actively engaging the viewer in the artwork.

The exhibition continues on the gallery’s second floor with sculptures, installations and paintings that weave together the major themes of Eliasson’s decades-long practice. The evocative Space resonates regardless of our presence series from 2017 presents concentric bands of delicately modulated light and shadow, cast on the walls of a darkened room. The optical instrument employs a section from a glass lens originally designed for use in lighthouses. This lens gathers stray beams of light and casts them at a consistent angle, thus enhancing the visibility of the light at sea. Here the effect of this lens exploits light’s potential as a malleable material.