Exhibition of the week Olafur Eliasson: In real life
Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, tate.org.uk). Until 5 January 2020
Renowned for his “epic”, perception-altering installations, Olafur Eliasson (b.1967) is one of the art world’s most celebrated figures, said Rosemary Waugh in Time Out. The Danish-Icelandic artist came to international prominence with 2003’s
The Weather Project, a “monumental” installation at Tate Modern that, using light, mirrors and smoke machines, transformed the museum’s Turbine Hall “into a pulsating, hazy sunset”. This extraordinary work became a sensation, attracting some two million visitors and helping to turn the fledgling Tate Modern into a major tourist attraction. Sixteen years on, Eliasson has returned to the museum with a major retrospective, and it does not disappoint. The show tracks his career to date, bringing together about 40 works; it includes many astonishing “large-scale installations”, from an entire gallery wall covered in moss to Beauty, a 1993 contraption capable of turning “microscopic water droplets” into an indoor rainbow. This is a wonderful exhibition that confirms its subject as “a 21st century master of the sublime”.
Eliasson’s earliest work is surprisingly “minimal” in character, said Mark Hudson in The Daily Telegraph. Window Projection
(1990) consists of just a “spotlight projecting an illuminated window frame” onto the wall, while Solitude and Silence
(1991) is nothing more than a lit candle atop a circular mirror. Simple as these works are, they have a “melancholy and distinctively Nordic edge”. From here on things get grander in scale, culminating in installations like Your Blind
Passenger (2010) – “a 128ftlong corridor filled with yellow fog, in which you can never see more than a few feet in front of you”. Although they offer “moments of startling, otherworldly beauty”, there is little “depth” to Eliasson’s big optical illusions. Ultimately, his work is disappointingly short on the “substance” that makes great art.
There’s no doubting Eliasson’s ambition, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. He wants us to see his art as a response to geopolitics, climate emergency and other weighty, global issues. A couple of exhibits, such as a bronze block cast around the shape of “the space left from a melted chunk of glacial ice”, do indeed offer “intimations of the uncertain future”. Elsewhere, however, the works themselves simply don’t tally with his lofty pronouncements, leaving “a suspicion that what isn’t all smoke and mirrors, is all talk”. There are some “ravishing” sights here, but one suspects that Eliasson’s art isn’t nearly as radical as he and Tate Modern seem to think it is.