Olafur Eliasson: OPEN: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) is delighted to present Olafur Eliasson: OPEN from September 15, 2024 through July 6, 2025 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The first major solo museum show of the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin) in Los Angeles, OPEN is part of the landmark Getty initiative PST ART: Art & Science Collide and is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, and Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, and Anastasia Kahn, former Curatorial Assistant. Continuing Eliasson’s career-long exploration of light and color, geometry, and environmental awareness, Olafur Eliasson: OPEN presents a series of site-specific installations responding to MOCA Geffen’s building and the atmospheric conditions of Los Angeles.

Olafur Eliasson: OPEN features over a dozen works commissioned for MOCA, along with a selection of recent works organized around the artist’s research on perception, optical devices, physics and natural phenomena, navigational instruments, and color experimentation. Eliasson draws attention to the relativity of our perception and challenges habitual ways of seeing and experiencing the world. The exhibition is informed by the artist’s belief in the potential of inconclusiveness—the idea that every artwork contains an aspect that is radically open.

“Olafur Eliasson’s work is an invitation to explore, reconsider, and co-produce our relationship with the world around us,” said Johanna Burton, The Maurice Marciano Director. “His innovative use of light, color, and space transforms the familiar into the ephemerally extraordinary, encouraging a deeper engagement with the environment and our perceptions of it. This exhibition is a natural extension of MOCA’s commitment to environmental programming, as seen in our ongoing presentations and initiatives focused on climate change and sustainability.”

“In this ambitious project, Eliasson taps into the legacies of artists intimately tied to Los Angeles and MOCA’s rich history of experimentation and innovation," said Blondet. "From Michael Asher’s site-specific interventions, to Maria Nordman’s exploration of space and time, to Robert Irwin’s perceptual experiments with light and space and James Turrell’s pioneering work in the use of light as a medium.”

“Eliasson is an artist of singular vision who combines scientific levels of precision with a poetic sensibility about the metaphysics of perception,” says co-curator Lowery. “His deep engagement with the specific architectural setting of The Geffen Contemporary will animate this beloved building in new ways for first-time and long-time visitors alike.”

OPEN is conceived as a number of fluid experiences staged in the vast industrial spaces of The Geffen Contemporary. The exhibition’s central gallery becomes a point of departure and return, welcoming visitors to meander throughout the museum as they interact with various optical devices that refract and reframe the building and its environments. OPEN offers unique explorations of light, perception, and interaction with the environment.

Installation view of Olafur Eliasson: OPEN, September 15, 2024–July 6, 2025 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Photo by Zak Kelley.