Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion

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The Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, designed by the internationally acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson and the award-winning Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, of the architectural practice Snøhetta, is now open to the public and will remain on site until November 2007.

The Pavilion acts as a “laboratory” every Friday night with artists, architects, academics and scientists leading a series of public experiments. The programme, conceived by Eliasson and Thorsen with the Serpentine, will begin in September and culminate in an extraordinary, two-part, 48-hour marathon laboratory event exploring the architecture of the senses.

The Serpentine Pavilion 2007 is a spectacular and dynamic building. The timber-clad structure resembles a spinning top and brings a dramatic vertical dimension to the more usual single level Pavilion. A wide spiralling ramp makes two complete turns, ascending from the Gallery’s lawn to the seating area and continues upwards, culminating at the highest point in a view across Kensington Gardens and down into the chamber below.

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is based in Berlin where he established Studio Olafur Eliasson, a laboratory for spatial research. His work explores the relationship between individuals and their surroundings, as experienced in his awe-inspiring large-scale installation The weather project, 2003, at Tate Modern. Publisher of a new magazine that melds artistic and architectural experimentation, Eliasson is currently involved in numerous architectural projects such as the Icelandic National Concert and Conference Centre in Reykjavik (design of the building envelope).

He is collaborating with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., on a project that reconsiders the Museum’s communicative potential, and he recently won the competition for a large rooftop extension at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

Kjetil Thorsen is co-founder of Snøhetta, one of Scandinavia’s leading architectural practices, with offices in Oslo and New York. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt, 1995–2001, is the commission that brought Snøhetta to international acclaim. Thorsen is responsible for the design of award-winning public buildings globally, and has collaborated with Eliasson several times, including The Opera House, Olso, currently under construction. He is a founder of Galleri Rom, Oslo, which focuses on the intersection of architecture and art, and is a member of the Norwegian Architectural Association (NAL) and the American Institute of Architects (AIA). He is also Professor at the Institute for Experimental Studies in Architecture at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.

Previously on { feuilleton }
The London Oasis
New Olafur Eliasson

New Olafur Eliasson

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left: The Weather Project,
Tate Modern, 2003.

Olafur Eliasson
Ikon, Birmingham

Alfred Hickling
Thursday August 3, 2006
The Guardian

The Danish artist Olafur Eliasson is best known in this country for the Weather Project, which had visitors to Tate Modern’s turbine hall convinced they were staring into the sun. His installation at Ikon, though smaller, similarly leaves you with spots before your eyes.

There has always been a quasi-scientific element to Eliasson’s work: here he teams up with Boris Oicherman of the University of Leeds to conduct an experiment in colour perception. It’s an old saw that the Inuit recognise over 30 different shades of white. But it’s also worth considering that Russians distinguish two different types of blue, while the English language is unique in having a word for pink. Eliasson’s installation is an intriguing demonstration that, as everyone’s retinas are distinct as their thumb-prints, no two people experience the same colour alike.

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It begins with a rainbow frieze of coloured blocks demonstrating the spectrum visible to the human eye, painstakingly prepared by master colourists. You next enter a darkened room, where assistants guide you through the experiment. You peer down the eyepiece of an instrument which displays two differently coloured semicircles, and spin a dial until both appear to be a matching shade. It’s reminiscent of the test they made you take at school for colour-blindness; you half expect to be scrutinised by the nit-nurse afterwards.

The final room projects random results against the wall like a large, illuminated piece of op art. Fortunately these are anonymous, as the last thing you wish to have publicised as an art critic is that your colour perception is rubbish. It’s fascinating proof that some people have difficulty distinguishing lemon from lime. But, naturally, I like to believe that my own contribution was spot on.

• Until September 17, 2006.

Ikon Gallery
1 Oozells Square
Brindleyplace
Birmingham