GOSLAR.- On October 12, Olafur Eliasson was presented with the Kaiserring of the city of Goslar, one of the most respected art prizes of the present time. The jury has awarded the prize to the Danish-Icelandic artist because he ‘embodies the type of researcher/artist that has been influential and admired since Leonardo da Vinci.’ The elements of his art are light and colour, fog and water, movement and reflection. In his works scientific and aesthetic phenomena are combined.

In connection with the prize, Olafur Eliasson has conceived an exhibition at the Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar. It has been conceived specifically for the building in which the museum is provisionally housed until May 2014, and plays with the relationship between inside and outside. At the same time it is a survey of Eliasson’s working methods in all their variety. Visitors get to the cabinet-like rooms of the museum via a long corridor which the artist has bathed in mono-frequency yellow light that reduces the beholder’s colour perception to the yellow and black regions of the spectrum. When visitors leave the corridor, the yellow light continues to have its effect by influencing, in a number of ways, the perception of the rooms hidden behind the closed doors.

While the artist’s space-embracing light and water experiments direct the focus of view towards the interior of the rooms, alterations in the windows bring the museum’s exterior indoors. A kaleidoscope opening to the outside, for example, fragments every image viewed into myriads of facets.

In addition, the exhibition displays series of photographs of Iceland, a country whose landscape and light have influenced Olafur Eliasson and his work in many different ways. A comparatively new medium in his oeuvre is film, represented here in three works. To round off the exhibition, a selection of monographs and artist books document Eliasson’s many and varied forms of expression.

Olafur Eliasson
The artist was born in Copenhagen in 1967 and set up Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin in 1995. There, together with a team of technicians, architects and art historians, he implements his ideas and designs. His works span paintings and sculptures, building projects and installations, photography and film. After being appointed to the Berlin University of the Arts in 2009, Eliasson set up his Institut für Raumexperimente.