Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque, 21 Nov 2015 — 06 Mar 2015
Exhibitions

Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque

Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Himmelpfortgasse 8

Belvedere and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) have announced their upcoming exhibition with the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.

Baroque Baroque is an ambitious venture that brings together and reconnects some of Eliasson’s most significant works from the holdings of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) and the Juan & Patricia Vergez collections. The overview of artworks from two decades of Eliasson’s artistic practice will explore the affinities between his work and the extraordinary baroque setting of the Belvedere’s Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna. Alongside these works, new site-specific interventions will activate and articulate the historical ensemble, establishing a dialogue between the volubility of the baroque architecture and the modulating perception provided by Eliasson’s artworks.

Eliasson states, “I find it inspiring that the baroque exhibited such confidence in the fluidity of the boundaries between models of reality and, simply, reality. The presentation of my works at the Winter Palace is based on trust in the possibility of constructing reality according to our shared dreams and desires and on faith in the idea that constructions and models are as real as anything.”

Eliasson plays elegantly with visual illusion, with the liminal and the ephemeral, and with the material and the immaterial, using extroversion and introspection to resonate with cosmological ideas; his works relate strongly to notions of transformation and artifice inherent in the concept of the baroque. As an epoch of great turmoil, the baroque saw revolutionary optical and scientific discoveries as well as a blossoming of interest in the phantasmagoric and the occult. The baroque is here understood as a prolific process of constant reformulation; the tension between light and dark, knowledge and speculation, and rationality and spirituality opens up unexpected, “other” spaces of potentiality and transformation.

Contacts & Details
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ADDRESS
Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Himmelpfortgasse 8
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