The Weather Man

November 25, 2009 | Laura Carroll

In a pattern all his own, Olafur Eliasson has saturated Europe’s world of contemporary art.

Eliasson's The Weather Project, installed in the Tate Modern. Photo: Olafur Eliasson, Tate London

America’s too, and now that of the East, with a current solo exhibition in Kanazawa, Japan. The exhibition commenced Saturday, and will remain installed until March 22.

The Danish-Icelandic artist is perhaps most famous for The Weather Project, a weather system created in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003. Visitors were cast with sunlight and dampened with precipitation in a building seemingly void of a ceiling, while cast under one of Eliasson’s favorite lighting maneuvers – mono-frequency lamps that drain both skin and surroundings of color, like walking through a black and white movie.

My first exposure (no pun intended) to my now favorite artist was in the summer of 2008, when MoMA and its affiliate, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, hosted an Eliasson exhibition titled Take Your Time. As a P.S.1 intern, I spent my workdays listening to the mild roar of his Backwards Waterfall and the evenings sitting in a dark room dewy with his Beauty – a continuous, vertical mist illuminated by soft, swirling light. Children ran through its wetness, while adults sat back and marveled. Upstairs was the exhibition’s namesake – a round, slightly crooked mirror taking up the near-entirety of the ceiling, under which visitors were invited to lay, studying their reflection and others – an exercise in taking one’s time, indeed.

Though popular around the globe, Eliasson is decidedly Scandinavian. His photography, series of pictures arranged grid-like on a wall, show the icy landscapes on which he grew up – an eerie beauty illustrated in cold caverns, waterfalls and snow. The artist also fills gallery walls with Icelandic moss, the floors with lava rock – a homage to his homeland that you move through like a living room.

Currently living and working in Berlin, Eliasson has numerous works throughout Europe. His unique, reflection-evoking style warrants visitation no matter what your preferred art genre, and I would urge anyone to seek out the work of the artist that has - in every sense of the cliché – taken the world by storm.

Consult Gallery Guide or the artists web site for a list of his nearby works.