NEW YORK.- The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center present Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, the first comprehensive survey in the United States to explore the highly experimental work of Olafur Eliasson, whose large-scale immersive environments and installations elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Iceland. Eliasson’s work recontextualizes elements such as light, water, ice, fog, stone, and moss to create unique situations that shift the viewer’s perception of place and self. By transforming the galleries into hybrid spaces of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life. The exhibition’s 38 works—installed at both MoMA and P.S.1.—include 14 of those featured in the originating exhibition first presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, along with 24 additional works, six of which were specifically created for this exhibition. Drawing from public and private collections worldwide, the exhibition will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from April 20 through June 30, 2008.

The exhibition is organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, former Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where the exhibition originated. In New York, it is coordinated and expanded by Roxana Marcoci, Curator, Department of Photography, and Klaus Biesenbach, Chief Curator, Department of Media, The Museum of Modern Art.

Ms. Marcoci and Mr. Biesenbach explain, "During the last two years we have worked directly with the artist and the Studio Olafur Eliasson to conceive one exhibition in two locations—MoMA and P.S.1—by catalyzing the curatorial methodologies and spatial perspectives of the Kunsthaus and the Kunsthalle and thus arriving at an exhibition that is about the artist's process and is at once a scholarly retrospective, an experimental site, and a laboratory."

Over the past 15 years, Eliasson has experimented with a range of lighting effects, from reflected daylight to artificial sources. His installations based on mechanisms of motion, projection, shadow, and reflection have come to embody a protocinematic approach—a practice that explores the space between photography and film. Eliasson creates complex optical phenomena using simple, makeshift technical devices.

At MoMA, 13 large-scale installations fill the galleries and hallways of the second and third floors: The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium on the second floor, and the Special Exhibitions Gallery, The Louise Reinhardt Smith Gallery, the escalator lobby, and The Robert B. Menschel Architecture and Design Gallery on the third floor. The exhibition begins in the Marron Atrium on the second floor, where Ventilator (1997), a fan hanging from the ceiling, rotates in ever-changing arcs, eight feet above the floor.

The exhibition continues on the third floor of the Museum at the top of the escalators and in The Louise Reinhardt Smith Gallery with the installation Room for one colour (1997), in which monofrequency bulbs bathe the space in dense yellow light, turning everything inside duotone. Viewers proceed to The Robert B. Menschel Architecture and Design Gallery and the installation I only see things when they move (2004). This room-size work fills the space with bright light that shines through rotating, color-filtered glass panels, creating shifting prismatic bands of colors on the surrounding walls. To the east of the escalators is Space reversal (2007), an enclosed space full of mirrors where viewers and their surroundings are reflected into infinity.

Just before entering the Special Exhibitions Gallery, viewers walk past Negative quasi brick wall (2003), a stack of stainless steel “bricks,” with mirrored interiors. The “bricks” are arranged in six different positions to create a reflective, kaleidoscopic wall. Inside the gallery are three of the six new works made by Eliasson specifically for this exhibition. Mirror door (user), Mirror door (spectator), and Mirror door (visitor) (all 2008) use spotlights aimed at rectangular mirror doors to create pools of light on the gallery floor as well as in the artificial dimension within the mirrors. A related work, Mirror door (observer), is on view at P.S.1.

To the left of the gallery entrance, 1 m3 light (1999) is a dark room filled with fog, through which the beams of 24 spotlights articulate one cubic meter of space. Next to this is a round room filled with changing colored light, 360º room for all colours (2002), which references the tradition of 19th century painted panoramas that evoked faraway landscapes or historic events, yet instead immerses viewers in the color spectrum itself. With Moss wall (1994), live reindeer moss anchored to the gallery wall gives off a natural fragrance. The moss is cultivated throughout the exhibition, changing shape and color naturally.

In the next gallery, Your strange certainty still kept (1996) comprises strobe lights that illuminate a thin curtain of falling water, making it appear that the droplets are frozen in midair, like early “flicker films.” The last installation at MoMA is Wall eclipse (2004), in which a spotlight shines on a mirror that hangs from the ceiling and rotates on its axis at a speed of one revolution per minute. Once in every rotation, the mirror’s shadow fully eclipses the wall behind it while the mirror’s reflection illuminates the opposite wall.

At P.S.1, 25 works—large- and small-scale installations, photographic series, a print series, and two rooms full of models—occupy the third-floor Main Galleries, as well as the Archives, the Duplex, and the Vault. Beginning on the third floor, in P.S.1’s largest gallery, is the monumental new installation Take your time (2008). A circular mirror, 40 feet in diameter and weighing 600 pounds, is mounted to the ceiling at an angle, rotating at one revolution per minute. The installation destabilizes viewers’ perception of space as they pass beneath it. Model room (2003), presented in two galleries, offers a display of mixed-media models, maquettes, and prototypes that provide a glimpse into Eliasson’s creative process, showing how he and his collaborators use the studio as a laboratory for investigating diverse materials and forms.

Several photographic series that serve as studies for the concepts explored in Eliasson’s installations are included in galleries on the third floor. He has created gridded photographic suites since the early years of his career; he makes the photographs during his regular trips to Iceland, where he focuses on glaciers, rivers, islands, caves, and other features of that country’s diverse and rugged landscape. Included in this exhibition are eight series, including the 56-print The island series (1997), the 36-print The inner cave series (1998), and the 48-print Jokla series (2004).