Berlin Gallery Weekend 2025 arrives this May with renewed creative energy, reaffirming the city’s position as a global nexus for contemporary art. Against the backdrop of Berlin’s ever-evolving cultural landscape, and amid financial cuts affecting many programmes that have made the city attractive for artists in the first place, Gallery Weekend offers a moment of shared focus.

Despite the rising costs and perennial buzz about other cities vying to be the 'New Berlin,' BGW director Antonia Ruder cuts through the noise: 'I would say that what matters is the density of the artists living here. International stars such as Monica Bonvicini, Anne Imhof, and Olafur Eliasson – all of whom are participating this year – live and work here.' It’s this critical mass of creative minds that continues to define Berlin’s gravitational pull. Now in her second year at the helm, Ruder is on a mission to further professionalise the much-emulated format first launched by Berlin gallerists over two decades ago. This year, that vision takes shape through a new podcast pairing Berlin’s art writers with the artists generating buzz, and a growing network of VIP ambassadors aimed at drawing more visitors to the city – particularly from this year’s target region: Asia.

This year, alongside more than 50 participating galleries, West Berlin’s storied luxury department store KaDeWe is presenting a 24/7 pop-up exhibition in its display windows, bringing contemporary art to the high-volume footfall of the high-street, with Berlin-based artists including Saâdane Afif, Karin Sander, or Alexandra Bircken, to name a few. Meanwhile, Berlin’s institutions are stepping up with unmissable exhibitions—most notably a double-header Yoko Ono retrospective split between the Neue Nationalgalerie and Gropius Bau. On Friday, May 2, in a night that’s already sold out, Berlin fixture and performer Peaches will restage Ono’s legendary Cut Piece, adding a charged, contemporary layer to the historic work.

As the first project under Hamburger Bahnhof’s new partnership with the Chanel Culture Fund, Klára Hosnedlová’s embrace takes over the museum’s vast hall with unapologetic scale and style, transforming it into a hauntingly surreal environment. On view until October 26, 2025, the installation features nine-metre-high woven tapestries, embroidered sculptural panels, cast-glass forms, concrete slabs, and site-specific objects arranged in theatrical, almost sacred configurations. Drawing from Brutalist architecture and the domestic aesthetics of post-Soviet interiors, Hosnedlová explores the fragility of utopia, the weight of memory, and the textures of survival. Hosnedlová‘s first institutional show encapsulates Chanel Commission’s mission: backing high-impact, materially rich work that pushes boundaries.

Amongst the highlights on the official program is Berlin’s newest art space, Die Tankstelle, opening its doors in a restored 1950s gas station in Schöneberg—now home to a collaboration between Pace Gallery and Galerie Judin (the space also includes a café-bookshop by Die ZEIT.) Its inaugural programming sets a bold tone: Pace presents Reverse Alchemy, featuring works on paper by Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Robert Nava. The exhibition explores the concept of transforming high art back into raw, primal expression – a nod to Dubuffet’s art brut ethos. Simultaneously, Galerie Judin unveils a Tom of Finland retrospective, spotlighting the artist’s iconic, hyper-stylised depictions of queer masculinity.

Navigating over 50 galleries during Berlin Gallery Weekend is thrilling but demanding. With shows spread from Schöneberg’s sleek spaces to Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg’s hidden gems, the challenge lies in both logistics and curation. Notably, many highlights come courtesy of women and women-identifying artists. Anne Imhof returns to Galerie Buchholz with Cold Hope, a series of large paintings based on film stills, digitally manipulated and layered with moiré effects. Developed alongside her recent blockbuster New York performance DOOM: House of Hope—a sprawling, operatic piece blending choreography, sound, and live action in shifting tableaux—the show translates her visceral, time-based practice into a more abstract, contemplative realm.

Marianna Simnett presents Charades at Galerie Société—a multi-layered exhibition exploring ritual, and performative deception. The show features new video works, sculptures, and oil paintings, a medium that the artist has only recently started working with, that blur the line between masquerade and myth. Central to the exhibition is Leda Was a Swan, a striking video piece reimagining the ancient tale of Zeus and Leda through a contemporary feminist lens. With her signature mix of the grotesque and the theatrical, Simnett confronts societal norms and bodily politics.

For its Gallery Weekend debut, NOME presents UNCENSORED by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, following her 2024 solo show at LAS. Blending video, sound, drawing, and sculpture, her work confronts cultural repression and emotional avoidance. Using elements of horror and surrealism, Brathwaite-Shirley invites viewers into raw, disquieting encounters.

Sprüth Magers unveils Retinal Rivalry, a cinematic tour de force by Cyprien Gaillard. Shot in razor-sharp ultra-HD 3D at 120 frames per second, the film plunges viewers into a disorienting, almost hallucinatory experience. From the dizzying excess of Oktoberfest’s final hours to the ghostly remnants of Roman Cologne, Gaillard collapses time and space into a hypnotic meditation on urban spectacle, decay, and the haunting persistence of history. It’s a definitive must-see, no matter how long the queues that are likely to form outside the space.

Venturing beyond the official Gallery Weekend program is both inevitable and deeply rewarding. In Mitte, Mountains gallery presents Luftbrücke, a moving solo exhibition dedicated to the late Filipino artist David Medalla. Curated with his partner Adam Nankervis, the show spans Medalla’s iconic Bubble Machines, his participatory piece A Stitch in Time, neon sculptures, rare paintings, and archival materials. Anchored by his 1997–98 DAAD residency in Berlin, Luftbrücke connects Medalla’s nomadic, communal practice with the city’s layered histories—art as both personal journey and collective lifeline. It’s a fitting tribute in a city that, despite recurring declarations of its demise, continues to lure artists with its promise of reinvention and resonance.

Berlin Gallery Weekend is 2- 4 May 2025

It’s half a century since BMW pioneered the intersection between automotive design and fine art. The very first BMW Art Car was unveiled in 1975, the work of American sculptor Alexander Calder. The idea came from French auctioneer and racing driver Hervé Poulai, who convinced Jochen Neerpasch, the founder and head of BMW Motorsport, to let Calder create the livery of the BMW 3.0 CSL he was entering into that year’s 24 Hours of Le Mans. Despite not finishing, Poulain’s idea set the stage for more collaborations, buoyed by a positive public reception.

The scheme was driven by a collaboration with Leo Castelli, the pioneering New York art gallerist and dealer. Castelli’s contacts brought Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol into the project to create new liveries for Poulain’s subsequent drives at Le Mans. Then in the early 1980s, the Art Car programme opened up and invited artists to work on standard product models, before returning to a racing focus in 1999. Since then, the BMW Art Car has been a dynamic expression of the company’s commitment to the arts in all its forms, ‘a perfect playground for art and design, technology and innovation, motorsport and engineering’.

To celebrate the scope and scale of this ongoing corporate commitment, BMW has released archive imagery of the works in progress, as well as announced a worldwide celebratory programme of exhibitions and displays. The BMW Art Car World Tour will roll through 2025 and 2026, taking select cars to auto shows and fairs, including Art Basel Hong Kong, the Shanghai Auto Show, Art Basel and Contemporary Istanbul. There will also be a major display at the Louwman Museum in The Hague throughout July and August 2025, featuring eight of the 20 cars.

The BMW Art Cars and their creators

Further information on the BMW Art Car Collection can be found at BMW.com

While artists often hope to control the way their work is received, a survey of mostly new work by Olafur Eliasson takes a different stand in its title: 'Open'. His exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, many years in preparation, includes 11 new pieces that invite participation without prejudice. Simply walk into the vast darkened galleries and be immersed in the effects of light as it is transformed by prisms, mirrors or LEDs into pure experience. 'Open' is also the title of a giant rainbow, glowing on a wall, that is produced by a round prism milled by the artist. 'A rainbow is actually a circle that only appears to be an arch because of the horizon line. In this case, the floor of the gallery is what keeps the rainbow from being a full circle,' he explains.

Some of his new light sculptures are housed in hollow towers up to 40 feet tall and constructed roughly with materials leftover from a previous exhibition. Attached to the building’s existing skylights, they act as kaleidoscopes offering beautiful warnings of the earth’s fragility. One piece titled 'Observatory for seeing the atmosphere’s futures' presents the illusion of a sphere, a floating planet, whose tonalities shift according to the weather and the time of day.

The sculpture titled 'Viewing machine for imagining oceanic futures' startles with a view of the sky being flooded with water. 'I have a wave machine on the roof of the building so it is as if we were submerged underwater,' he explains.

Eliasson, who is Icelandic/Danish and living in Berlin, experienced early notoriety for his 2003 'Weather Project' in the Tate Turbine Hall. Since then, he has grown increasingly rigorous in his efforts at sustainability in an art world known for extravagant waste. He praises MOCA director Johanna Burton for being unusually sensitive to the environmental impact of exhibition staging. 'This is the first museum we have collaborated with which was at the level of our standards. That’s also kind of open.'

He explains the show’s capitalised title: OPEN. 'Some museums come across as being elitist and unavailable. Being open is being hospitable. It’s to exercise your interest in listening. Polarisation has been normalised. I declare myself the position of being free to not polarise, right? Within our vulnerability, there is the potential of courage. What’s the most courageous thing you did? It is asking for help.'

'Have the courage to lower your own defenses. The openness that we carry within ourselves is behind an armour, a social mask. I think fundamentally people are good. But if we leave no space for that to flourish, it’s going to be hard to cultivate.”

It is a busy year for Eliasson who is having exhibitions simultaneously at the elegant Istanbul Modern and the Singapore Art Museum. The presentation in L.A., organised in part by MOCA curators José Luis Blondet and Rebecca Lowery as part of the Getty-funded PST art initiative 'Art and Science Collide', is dramatically different and immensely personal. The warehouse was transformed in 1982 by then emerging architect Frank Gehry. Named the Temporary Contemporary, (now the Geffen Contemporary) it was designed for use only until the permanent MOCA, designed by Arata Isozaki, opened in 1984. However, its appeal to artists and curators, due to massive undivided spaces and high ceilings, led the museum to maintain it as a secondary site. Significant for Eliasson, Moca was a conceived as an artist’s museum, with artists participating in all the early discussions about its development. One of the most important and vocal was Robert Irwin, (1928-2023) the pioneer of West Coast perceptually-driven art and a prime early influence on Eliasson. 'Well, it's coming full circle with me,' he says. 'I could not be more proud.'

Because of the artist’s lengthy connection to L.A., this particular exhibition has given him added perspective. 'As an artist, I’ve been around for about 30 years. The gratitude I have, I’ve decided to transform it into tenderness, rather than monumentalism.'

Olafur Eliasson's new exhibition, 'Open,' is at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles until July 6 2025

moca.org

WeTransfer, our favourite file transfer service, just added another creative string to its bow with the announcement of 2024’s annual guest curator, the Icelandic–Danish artist Olafur Eliasson.

This partnership with an artist famed for his focus on environmental issues also highlights WeTransfer’s newly elevated B Corp score, the rating that grades companies that meet ‘high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency’. Eliasson will use the WePresent arts platform to showcase work by artists who are dedicated to highlighting the climate crisis.

Back in April, Eliasson took to WePresent to publish ‘10 rules for celebrating food’, part of the site’s ongoing A Manifesto By series. As the site’s latest guest curator, Eliasson joins a list that includes the artist Marina Abramovic, musician Solange Knowles and actor and art collector Russell Tovey.

Eliasson will give a number of new voices a place on the WePresent platform, addressing not just the climate crisis but ‘adjacent issues which he views as deeply interconnected’. These will include the little-discussed issue of climate justice, along with systemic racism and gender politics.

‘I’m grateful to WeTransfer for inviting me to be the guest curator of this year,’ Eliasson says. ‘WePresent is a vibrant space that is both personal and boundless – something I find particularly valuable in 2024. Together, we hope to amplify voices addressing the pressing issues of our time.’

As Eliasson notes in his opening editor's letter, ‘Artists, musicians, writers, dancers, performers – they all give shape to the complexity of our present moment and can speak to us directly as individuals.' Confirmed collaborations include the art director Sarah Masete, artist Hadeer Omar, and writer and theorist Neema Githere, 'all [of whom] address complexity and host discussions that I find deeply inspiring', according to Eliasson. 'I am extremely pleased to work as a guest curator with WeTransfer to further amplify their crucial voices, to spark important discussion and inspire others.'

WePresent finds a monthly audience of around 3 million people across 190 countries, while the file transfer platform itself has a user base of over 80 million people. ‘We're committed to amplifying the voices of artists who use their platforms to do good, and Olafur Eliasson is exemplary,’ says Holly Fraser, VP of Content at WeTransfer. ‘He has long been a champion of sustainability, climate activism and the need for collective change.’

Olafur Eliasson, OlafurEliasson.net, @StudioOlafurEliasson

WeTransfer.com, @WeTransfer

WePresent.WeTransfer.com, @WePresent

Looping abstractions formed from spiralling modules of interconnected polyhedra. Circular drawings created by desert sun and winds. Dancing trajectories of water droplets caught in light while falling through darkness. According to the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, these works are threaded together by ideas of ‘deep time, slowness, motion and geometry’ – and they can now be viewed at Azabudai Hills Gallery, part of the major new district and cultural hub in the heart of Tokyo that opened this week (see our Azabudai Hills walkthrough with Thomas Heatherwick).

The culmination of three decades of planning, Azabudai Hills is inspired by the idea of a modern urban village, with three skyscrapers rising into the clouds, between which flows a green network of Heatherwick Studio-designed lower-level architecture and landscaping, housing offices, residences, shops, health clinics, a hotel and a school.

Azabudai Hills Gallery

Culture is a critical connector. Aiming to dissolve the boundaries between daily life and art to boost wellness, the so-called city-in-a-city, developed by Mori Building, is home to more than 9,000 sq m of art and museum spaces (Pace and teamLab’s Borderless will open here next year).

The cultural heartbeat is Azabudai Hills Gallery, a new contemporary art space, which opens with a solo exhibition by Eliasson, who has also created a public artwork for the complex.

Eliasson – an artist who has recreated the ephemeral beauty of rainbows, made the sun rise over London, built waterfalls in New York and put a riverbed in a gallery (much of which is covered in Olafur Eliasson: Experience, published by Phaidon) – has spent decades exploring the dynamic between humans and their environment, often through large-scale expressions of the elements of nature.

His new works at Azabudai Hills are no less layered. Looking upwards in the glass-fronted lobby of Mori JP Tower (at 330m, the tallest skyscraper in Japan), A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows hangs from a 15m-high ceiling, comprising a set of four intricately delicate spiralling forms, each spanning 3m in diameter.

The spirals, made from recycled zinc (a first for Eliasson) follow the dynamic trajectory of a single point to express the movement found in all things. A complex series of interconnected, polyhedron-shaped modules is threaded into loops, twists and curves, their multi-faceted surfaces gently reflecting the shifting sun outside.

Explaining the concept to Wallpaper*, Eliasson says: ‘The work was inspired by shifting scales: looking simultaneously at the macro level, where everything is in constant motion, and at the micro level, where everything consists of tiny building blocks.

‘These large-scale motions are all, to a certain extent, cycles, even if they take place at a pace or scale that is beyond anything we can visualise – our planet, the sun, the solar system travelling through space, the passing of the seasons, the water cycle and the rock cycle on Earth. What appears solid is actually in motion, ephemeral. At the same time, the world is made up of these elemental building blocks that exhibit a clarity or structure that is seemingly stable – crystals, molecules, and atomic structures.’

Olafur Eliasson, ‘A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows’

The same ideas – of time, cycles, the motion of lines – are explored in his exhibition at Azabudai Hills Gallery, also called ‘A harmonious cycle of interconnected nows’, curated by Mami Kataoka, director of Mori Art Museum, and Hirokazu Tokuyama, associate curator at Mori Art Museum: ‘The concept of this whole development is green and wellness,’ says Tokuyama. ‘Olafur was one of the first artists who committed to this subject. It’s very easy to sense this connection in the exhibition and permanent artwork.’

The show, which has 15 new artworks, opens with Firefly biosphere (falling magma star), a red glass ball sculpture containing intricately refracted light that moves across the surrounding walls. Visitors can also interact with a pendulum-powered drawing machine, The endless study, drop a pen onto paper, and watch intricate patterns take shape, the result of three axes and two frequencies in motion.

Paintings are brought to life in the desert of Qatar using the natural elements – three with deep, strong scorch marks forged through the sun-heated base of glass touching paper; another three with ethereally blurred edges evoked through the wind-moving brushes on canvas.

‘I have worked on drawing machines for many years, going back to experiments I created with my father while he was working as a cook on a boat,’ says Eliasson. ‘We were interested in enlisting the help of the elements to make drawings that we ourselves might not have made on our own. In that case, it was the motion of the waves and the sea. In the more recent drawing machines, produced earlier this year for an artwork in the desert of Qatar, I have made use of the light of the sun to burn paper, and the power of the wind to move pendulums that cause marks on canvases.’

He adds: ‘These are artworks made by the planet, by the motion of the Earth or by the weather patterns at the site. I wanted to draw a connection between these seemingly small works and the large forces behind them, just as the permanent installation connects the two scales of cyclical motion and falling, modular geometrical elements.’

The wind theme continues in The air we breathe, made from the same modules of polyhedra used in his permanent artwork – this time in a vertical form, with air-blowing fans at its apex.

Explaining the recycled material, he says: ‘The zinc is a by-product of waste incineration. It’s filtered out of the smoke that in the past would have simply mixed into our atmosphere as air pollution. It’s still a rather experimental process.’

He adds: ‘In a sense, I see the recycled zinc as reflecting the pollution that has been removed from the air we breathe. The fans at the top of this tower of modules put the air into motion.

‘I’ve used fans a number of times in my art, in fact, and I like that they create an experience that is not visually perceptible but has a definite presence in the space as wind. So the work has a certain dematerial aspect while also being very much about materials.’

Another highlight is Your split second house: an installation stretching more than 20m in a long dark space, where strobe lights catch the flickering trajectories of water droplets from three pipes attached to the ceiling – to hypnotic sensory effect, from the visual beauty of the water to the sound of it drumming the floor and the moisture lingering in the air.

The café’s mindful menu to go with the show

Tapping into Eliasson’s long-held interest in the dialogue between food and art, The Kitchen at Azabudai Hills Gallery Café, in collaboration with Studio Olafur Eliasson Kitchen, is also showcasing a special menu to accompany the exhibition, with buffet dishes ranging from sweet miso glazed cauliflower and beetroot soup to black bean rice balls.

‘The kitchen at my studio has long played an important role in my practice,’ says Eliasson. ‘I see the potential of a kind of mindful cooking and eating, where you recognise the interconnectedness of things: how the head of lettuce contains the energy of the sun, converted via photosynthesis into sustenance, for example.’

‘Olafur Eliasson Exhibition: A Cycle of Harmony of Interconnected Nows’ from Friday 24 2023 – Sunday 31 March 2024

azabudai-hills.com

Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun has partnered with Ikea to create two lighting designs, part of a limited-edition collection that aims at raising awareness of alternative energy solutions. The solar-powered lamps are part of the Sammanländ collection, imagined to encourage users to experience solar energy within their home. 

The collection was conceived as part of Little Sun’s mission. Founded by Eliasson with engineer Frederik Ottesen, Little Sun’s mission is to give access to solar energy to communities without regular electricity, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa. 'If, however, we are to transition to a world powered by renewable energy in the next decade and create a more sustainable world for future generations, we will need everyone everywhere to recognise the importance of solar energy,' says Eliasson. 'When Ikea reached out to me with the idea of developing a project centred on solar power, I recognised this as an opportunity to spread awareness to a broader audience.'

 Ikea and Olafur Eliasson: Sammanländ 

'Collaborating with a company that shares many of our central beliefs has been incredibly encouraging – even more so, since IKEA can reach those who may not already know much about the potential of solar power and the vast disparities in energy access around the world,' adds Eliasson.

The collaboration comprises two LED lighting designs, both portable and solar-powered: a table lamp, and a smaller, portable lamp, whose concept originated from Eliasson's original Little Sun lamp. 

The design of the table lamp is informed by the Earth’s orbit around the sun, and is characterised by a half-sphere concealing the light source, placed on a round mirror and surrounded by two metal circles. The multifunctional object can also become a pendant lamp thanks to the adjustable metal frame, and the light source can be removed and used as a torch.

The second, smaller portable lamp is imagined for use in outdoor settings, and is equipped with a yellow strap to hold it, or hang it to recharge in the sunlight. Each lamp is also equipped with USB-A and USB-C ports, for when solar charging is not possible. When fully charged, the lamps' batteries can also support charging a mobile phone. 

‘With this collaboration, we wanted to spark a conversation around solar energy and put the power of the sun in the hands of the many people,’ says James Futcher, creative leader at Ikea. ‘Our shared belief is that the possibilities of thoughtful design lie in its ability to create awareness and make a difference.’

'My hope is that more design will simply be solar without being necessarily 'solar design', that is, the solar aspect will be taken for granted as normal,' adds Eliasson. 'This is because solar energy must be available to all. The power of the sun is abundant, inexpensive. It helps individuals and families own their access to power at the source, which makes them more self-sufficient, independent, and resilient.

'If we are to transition to a world powered by renewable energy in the next decade, we need everyone to recognise the opportunity of solar energy: sunlight is seemingly invisible, but solar energy allows us to make the invisible visible.'

LED solar-powered table lamp, £80, and LED solar-powered portable lamp £11, available from Ikea stores in April 2023.

ikea.com
littlesun.org

In 1466, when Filippo Strozzi was allowed to return to Florence following his banishment by the rival Medici family, he set out to build the city’s grandest palazzo as an act of status and power. 

Palazzo Strozzi sits like a lump of solid geology in the centre of Florence. With walls formed of oversized rusticated stone blocks, it has the feel of a fortress: thick, defensive, with a grid of double windows wrapping its four sides.

Since 2006 it’s been home to Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, which has staged exhibitions by leading contemporary artists with an occasional classical superstar thrown in; comfortably hosting Carsten Höller’s slides and Jeff Koons’ dazzling orbs, as well as Donatello’s sculptures. In his new show, ‘Nel Tuo Tempo’, Olafur Eliasson has become the latest to fill the Renaissance rooms, in his words ‘with nothing but ephemera – water, temperature, light’.

‘Usually, an exhibition is a survey or just new work, but this is both,’ the Icelandic-Danish artist tells Wallpaper*, and with curator Arturo Galansino, Eliasson and his studio have composed an exhibition of new site-specific works alongside a selection from three decades of creative experimentation with light, technology, and experience. That last component, experience, has remained central to Eliasson’s work, but here it’s emphasised – ‘I think an experience is not something that happens to us… but experiencing is something we do.’ 

The first three rooms feature new site-responsive works, ideas so rooted in the palazzo’s architecture that it is hard to imagine how they could ever be exhibited elsewhere. Eliasson focuses on the palazzo’s windows, which puncture those thick, defensive façades, to open conversation between internal spaces and the civic realm beyond. Spotlights with colour filters affixed to a neighbouring building shine across the street and through a palazzo window, casting a triplicate upon a screen inside and turning the transparent window into a repeating vapourwave sunset. Another installation projects through a window from inside to out, bouncing off a mirror beyond and back into the palazzo, reverberating the colours into a shimmer of yellow and blue. 

The largest of these window works is monochrome. Spotlighted from the palazzo’s courtyard, it duplicates a gridded window onto the gallery wall. In this ghostly repetition, Eliasson makes visible the glass’s impurities, dust, and centuries of patina – ‘When looking, we forget that the window is editing what is outside, the window is a lens … and lenses are part of the reality, we do not see an objective truth,’ he says. 

The central courtyard itself is a semi-public space for the city, open from the street for passersby to wander into. It’s here that visitors this autumn will encounter an Eliasson intervention, a vast, suspended elliptical form with a disrupting moiré pattern formed from its two layers. Walking into the courtyard and under it, the interference ripples, while within the rational geometry and symmetry of the courtyard the sculpture appears to shapeshift, becoming a circle and then stretching back to an ellipse.

Other rooms feature various Eliasson works which he selected to speak to the underlining themes of translucency, thresholds, and objectivity. Beauty (1993) comprises a wall of mist, the angled light refracting in the droplets to form a rainbow curtain that can be walked through. With a mirrored ceiling and semicircular arc dropping to the floor, How do we live together? (2019) erupts the space, disorientating the visitor who, looking up, sees themselves and a perfect sphere – a Renaissance rationality through deceit and illusion.

Windows reappear in a room featuring Triple window (1999), formed of three overlapping theatre spotlights projecting the form of a night-time window, here stretched and confusing the geometry. Facing it is Your timekeeping window (2022), in which the artist has embedded 24 glass spheres into a wall. We can see the palazzo window behind but it is inverted and deformed, each globe twisting the architecture in a subtly different way which dances as one walks past, an encounter which keeps shifting.

Another new work, Your view matter (2022), made in collaboration with Metapurse (a crypto fund founded by the pseudonymous collector Metakovan), is Eliasson’s first reach into virtual reality. With an ambient soundtrack created by the artist, the digital explorer can meander around various geometrical spaces, with more moiré and playful twists of colour and form. The most interesting moments are when crossing from one ‘room’ into another, and the two imagined aesthetics overlap and clash. In a future-looking way, lingering in that digital threshold seems to poetically riff on Eliasson’s studies of the glass windows, despite the two different architectures of palazzo and VR having five centuries between their constructions.

INFORMATION

Olafur Eliasson: 'Nel Tuo Tempo', until 22 January 2023, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. palazzostrozzi.org

Iceland may be first known for its unique geography and extreme climate, but it is equally notable for its cultural landscape, born of the dialogue between the natural environment and the burgeoning creative class. In spite of its small population (135,422 people as of April 2022), Reykjavík has carved out a foothold as an art capital, thanks to the recent emergence of several new art destinations in Reykjavík and a loyal following of international visitors, many of whom are finally venturing to its shores again. Located within manageable distances of the American East Coast, Scandinavia and continental Europe, Reykjavík has become a natural pitstop for inbound collectors attracted by a vibrant art scene that resonates just as strongly with its domestic audience. 

‘In the last few years, we’ve seen a lot more people travel here with art in mind. Art people also notify us that they’re coming because we’re in a small place, and that’s such a luxury,’ says Börkur Arnarson, co-founder of i8 Gallery, the country’s leading contemporary art gallery. A champion of Icelandic artists since it was founded 26 years ago, the gallery now represents some of the island nation’s biggest names, including Olafur Eliasson, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Roni Horn, an American who has visited Reykjavík regularly since 1975. ‘Our location has always been our biggest problem and our biggest asset.’

Arnarson has played a key role in establishing Reykjavík’s artistic points of difference. This January, he inaugurated i8 Grandi, the gallery’s second, significantly larger outpost that resides within Marshall House, a former fishing factory turned multidisciplinary art space. Nestled in the Grandi harbour district amongst traditional fishing warehouses, many of which have been converted into boutiques and restaurants, Marshall House is a prime example of historic and contemporary Reykjavík co-existing in irreplicable harmony. 

The development of Marshall House was instigated by Ásmundur Hrafn Sturluson and Steinþór Kári Kárason of Kurtogpí Architects, who spotted the vacant building from the water while conducting a student tour in 2012, and then brought Arnarson on board to help steer its programme. ‘Taking inspiration from spaces such as the Löwenbräukunst in Zurich, we felt that Reykjavík could use a multi-purpose arts space,’ Arnason recounts. The building’s renovation was completed in 2017. Apart from i8 Grandi, which sits over two floors, Marshall House is also home to the Living Art Museum, one of the oldest artist-run institutions in Europe, and the non-profit gallery Kling & Bang, a cherished favourite amongst locals. Olafur Eliasson’s private studio occupies the building’s top floor, while the ground floor is home to La Primavera, a restaurant that mixes Italian and Icelandic influences.

At i8 Grandi, Arnason has installed a novel, long-form presentation model that sees a single artist take over the exhibition space for an entire year. ‘[This concept] allows us to show new works along with old works, and to give artists the freedom to work in a different format,’ he says. ‘It will not be static for the whole year either, but a thoughtful, breathing exhibition.’

An acute understanding of time and space is one of the qualities that makes Icelandic art so captivating. The widely oscillating climate – which transforms from the barren, snow-covered landscape during the winter months, when as little as three hours of daylight is commonplace, into a vast and verdant expanse in the summertime, drenched in supernatural, never-ending light – fosters a unique level of introspection within all who live there. The country’s extreme character is also rooted into its bedrock, which has volcanoes, geysers, lava fields and hot springs hidden in plain sight. That latent drama and sense of solitude has proven to be a great creative stimulus, affording local artists, musicians and designers the time to refine their practices and points of view.

Icelandic artists have an astute ability to delve into microscopic details. A fascination with the unseen or the overlooked is one common thread that weaves through a range of mediums, be it the introspective multimedia work of artist Sigurður Guðjónsson, who represents Iceland at this year’s Venice Biennale with the multi-sensory sculpture Perpetual Motion, or in Eliasson’s dynamic, faceted facade for Harpa, Reykjavík’s concert hall and conference centre, inaugurated in 2011. 

Guðjónsson’s perception-bending video piece, which zooms in on the formations metal dust makes when attracted to a magnetic rod, invites viewers to reconsider the abstract. Scored to an atmospheric soundtrack and enlarged in projection, the work transports viewers to another world, in a similar way to Eliasson’s crystalline facade. Based on the extensive research of architect/mathematician Einar Thorsteinn, a follower of Buckminster Fuller who had a deep interest in geometrical structures, Eliasson’s facade incorporates ‘quasi-bricks’ –12-sided polyhedrons comprising hexagonal and rhomboidal faces. It exudes a frenetic combination of regularity and irregularity that creates different effects when experienced up close or from afar. Each module is installed with panes of colour-effect filter glass, making the entire building equally subject to the changing weather, light, and time of year as the people who visit it.

This sensitivity to the surrounding environment is a deeply-rooted aspect of Icelandic identity and one that’s articulated architecturally at the Reykjavík Art Museum Kjarvalsstaðir, a Nordic modernist building designed by Hannes Kr. Davíðsson and built in 1973. Featuring a copper roof, board-formed concrete walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that look onto a central courtyard while immersing visitors into the surrounding Klambratún park, the building is topped with a scheme of geometric skylights which diffuses natural light into its galleries, be it the sun’s long trajectory in the summer or its low position in the winter.

If Kjarvalsstaðir represents Iceland’s artistic past, then Höfuðstöðin, an immersive destination created by the New York-based Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir (also known as Shoplifter), encapsulates its future. Designed to permanently house Arnardóttir’s Chromo-Sapiens piece, which was unveiled at the Icelandic Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale, Höfuðstöðin is a cavernous, multi-sensory experience, made from colour-drenched, dendritic swathes of artificial hair.

Led by Arnardóttir and her business partner Lilija Baldurs, it builds on an existing tradition of private Reykjavík institutions dedicated to a single artist, like the Sigurjón Ólafsson Museum and the Einar Jónsson Museum, and is the first female-led art centre dedicated to a single female artist. Located in a historic barrack structure on the way out of the city and overlooking Elliðaárdalur valley, the surprising and disarming space presents the three-cave installation alongside a café, lounge and gift shop, once again embedded in nature.

‘Being from Iceland, we are born with this desire to explore because we feel so far removed from the rest of the world. It’s a state of mind. It’s different from being from somewhere with other countries surrounding you. People become very inventive because it’s so self-contained,’ reflects Arnardóttir, who has been based in New York for the last 25 years. ‘You are totally isolated and when you’re bored growing up, you just have to come up with stuff to do. I didn’t realise how unique this was until I moved away.’

‘I always had this desire to create an immersive experience, where people feel like they’re in a landscape. The hair and the way I installed it is reminiscent of the nervous system in our brains. Underneath our skin, there is a whole landscape that we don’t pay attention to, and there are colours, sounds, shapes and movement [there too],’ she continues. ‘[Walking in] is like diving underneath the surface of yourself or your psyche.’

With an exciting culinary scene – the elevated gastropub Matur og Drykkur is a perennial favourite with its creative spin on traditional Icelandic cuisine – and no shortage of creature comforts – its first 5* hotel, the Edition Reykjavík opened last November – Reykjavík’s allure is aptly summed up in the words of Roni Horn, who published a book in 2021, Island Zombie: Icelandic Writings, chronicling her impressions during her countless visits to Iceland over the last 45 years. Horn writes, ‘Iceland is young, so young erosion hasn’t yet obscured the origin of things. Youth and no trees reveal things rarely seen anywhere.’ To see it is truly to believe it.

INFORMATION

i8.is

marshallhusid.is

harpa.is

hofudstodin.com

The Donum Estate, a 200-acre winery nestled between California’s Napa and Sonoma counties, ranks among the world’s top destinations for outdoor sculpture. Its enviable holdings include a dozen bronze Zodiac Heads by Ai Weiwei, an apparently abandoned lead warplane by Anselm Kiefer, a giant pumpkin by Yayoi Kusama, and a stainless steel banyan tree sprouting dishes and pots by Subodh Gupta. But when Olafur Eliasson accepted an invitation from owners Mei and Allan Warburg to visit Donum three years ago, he wanted to contribute a piece of architecture rather than a sculpture.

‘It’s not about making a monument. The most important thing about a winery is the moment the wine goes into your mouth, so that’s what we set out to focus on: a wine-tasting pavilion,’ explains the artist as we meet in Berlin this April. Also present is Sebastian Behmann, his architectural collaborator since 2001 and fellow co-founder of Studio Other Spaces. The studio is known for its experiments at the intersection of architecture and art, with projects including Fjordenhus, the headquarters of an investment firm in Vejle, Denmark; The Seeing City, a permanent installation for the top two floors of a Paris skyscraper; and the upcoming Common Sky, a canopy of glass and mirrors for the courtyard of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

For Eliasson, wine is ‘a testimony to the Earth’. Its taste can be shaped by the winemaker, but ultimately it is determined by the landscape, its biodiversity, and of course the weather – a perennial occupation dating back to The Weather Project (2003), his seminal installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. His Vertical Panorama Pavilion at Donum Estate, which opens today (1 August 2022), is an ode to the natural conditions that make wine possible – a particularly fitting approach seeing as ‘Donum’ means ‘gift of the land’ in Latin. The pavilion’s defining feature is a conical canopy, 14.5m in diameter and comprising 832 colourful glass tiles that tell the story of the local weather. ‘It’s about celebrating the ephemeral, bringing to your attention everything that’s often unquantifiable, and therefore often forgotten.’

But first, the site. Studio Other Spaces was after a peaceful spot, not too close to Donum’s sculptures but also not too far. ‘We then wanted a substantial view over the estate to the north, but also towards the bay to the south. A site where you have everything in view, where you can look around and see the whole environment that constitutes the wine,’ says Behmann. Another requirement was that Donum’s other architecture should be largely out of view (there’s a wine production facility, a hospitality centre, and a white-cube conservation facility that houses artworks by Louise Bourgeois and El Anatsui), so visitors to the pavilion could admire an uninterrupted horizon, ‘where the sky meets the Earth’.

Eliasson and Behmann identified a small hill that met their needs, and the Warburgs agreed to relocate a Corten steel sculpture by Keith Haring to make way for the new pavilion. Then came the task of landscaping: the south-east part of the site was elevated to break the prevailing winds, and a winding gravel path was cut through the land to take visitors below ground level. As you meander along, you see the terrain rise around you – a reminder that soil is not only the ground you walk on, but also a home for roots and microorganisms. ‘By the time you arrive, you are in the ground below. You will have detoxed from the world outside Donum and sensitised yourself to experience the wine,’ says Eliasson.

The soil is the first of three layers in Studio Other Spaces’ vertical panorama concept, which takes you on a journey across several layers of Donum. ‘It’s bringing the horizontal idea of the panorama into one that is organised vertically,’ describes Behmann. The second layer is the flora and fauna, which appears at eye height as you enter the circular arrival space in the centre of the pavilion. This unusual perspective encourages you to inhale the scent of the grass, listen as it rustles in the wind, tune in to the chirping of insects, and admire the fluttering of butterflies. Your perception of the turf is further heightened by the light streaming through the deliberately low glass canopy, which dapples the space with kaleidoscopic hues. The effect is dazzling, dreamlike and characteristically Eliasson.

The arrival space opens into two further circular areas: a smaller service space, lined with cabinetry; and a larger tasting space, with elliptical brass tables and seating for twelve along its perimeter. Entering the tasting space, you sit down on thickly padded benches and lean against ovoid cushions that, according to Behmann, are inspired by ‘how squirrels put their things in the ground’. Having taken in the view of the bay to the south, your eyes are now trained on the canopy, which Studio Other Spaces have conceived as a calendar wheel. The 832 glass tiles consist of 24 colours in variations of translucent and transparent hues, giving visual form to the yearly averages of four meteorological parameters: wind, humidity, temperature and solar radiance. As Eliasson puts it, ‘you are looking at everything that has informed what you are about to taste’, the weather behind Donum’s renowned Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. An oculus in the centre of the canopy means your gaze will eventually settle on the azure skies.

Each of the four parameters is represented by individual rings within the calendar wheel, and there is a precise logic to the colours: for instance red stands for high temperatures and blue for low temperatures. But Eliasson and Behmann say that the canopy is not meant to be read as an infographic. Instead, its purpose is to make you aware of the elements. ‘It also gives credit to our subconscious to play a significant role in perceiving taste, light and colour,’ suggests Eliasson. ‘To offer people a legend to decipher the calendar would take attention away from the wine.’

The artist points out that in wine tasting sessions, and indeed in art exhibitions, there is a danger of inundating people with information and prescribing specific takeaways, ‘so they feel really stupid when they leave. It’s important not to talk down to people, but rather empower them to grow and flourish’. Though the Vertical Panorama Pavilion is immediately identifiable as an Eliasson project, it is also deliberately non prescriptive. Rather than imposing an artificial intervention (for instance, opting for an unconventional roof shape), the pavilion simply opens your senses to the natural surroundings, and affirms your appreciation of Donum’s wine.

He adds that ‘having different experiences of a wine is not necessarily a conflict. It is simply an acknowledgement of the potential of being together without having to be the same. There is an element of generosity to this, and of believing in a diverse tomorrow.’

Just as the intent of the Vertical Panorama Pavilion reflects Eliasson’s social convictions, its material palette and construction also align with his environmentalism: the low walls that line the pathway and pavilion interior are made of an earthy brick from nearby Sacramento (‘the idea is to use as much local knowledge and material intelligence as possible,’ says Behmann). The twelve columns supporting the glass canopy, and the structure of the canopy itself are all stainless steel, which eliminates the need for coatings and lends itself to eventual recycling. The 832 panels are made from recycled glass. The canopy’s concentric grid is backed by a spiral shell, which Behmann explains is a material saving construction: ‘As always, we work with the same mindset as architects like Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller, minimising material efforts by mimicking natural constructions and natural forms of growing.’ 

This passion for sustainability has certainly resonated with the Warburgs, who have championed biodynamic processes at Donum, alongside regenerative farming practices such as composting, biochar and livestock integration. ‘This pavilion blends perfectly with what we strive to achieve – a holistic sensory experience drawing on our passions of wine, nature and art, design and architecture,’ they say. ‘The design principles, set in the Californian light, will create a sensorial experience that draws on Donum’s participation in the natural world, to enhance the experience of all our visitors.’ 

INFORMATION

Vertical Panorama Pavilion is at the Donum Estate, 24500 Ramal Road, Sonoma, CA, thedonumestate.com; studiootherspaces.net

A version of this article will appear in the October 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + on 8 September 2022. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!

From virtual sunsets to supplements designed for astronauts, there are plenty of innovative ways to receive the health benefits of sunshine even if weather and lockdowns are keeping you in. Below, we outline some of the best fixes for sun-deprived skin and winter induced gloominess. 

Mind 

Virtual reality wellness apps have steadily grown in popularity this year, with more people looking to escape to faraway destinations without actually going anywhere. Spa’s like LA’s Lifehood offer massage therapies accompanied by a VR experience of a California sunset and CBD gummies.  

For a more artistic take on nature-turn-technology, artist Olafur Eliasson has created his own version of a digital escape hatch with his project ‘Wunderkammer’. Available to download on your phone, the project transposes elements of the natural world, like a burning sun or misty cloud, onto any interior setting.

Those looking to bring a little sunshine into their home need only to press a button to let the light in. The virtual sun’s rays can then be used to charge their ‘Little Sun’, a portable solar lamp Eliasson launched in 2012. 

Body 

Famed for their black diamond facemasks and cryogenic therapies, 111Skin has always thought outside the box when it comes to skincare. The brand’s Radiant Skin Beauty Dose is inspired by the supplements given to astronauts to protect their skin from the extreme environmental changes of outer space without its usual dosage of sunshine and fresh air. 

More dynamic than your typical Vitamin D supplement, these tablets use a unique blend of vitamins A, C, and E to trigger the body’s repair mechanisms and generate a natural radiance that’s difficult to achieve without sun exposure. 

Face 

Makeup artist Kristin Kjaer Weis began her own beauty line after she recognised the destructive effects standard products were having on the skin of models she worked with.

Preempting the recent trend of skincare-as-makeup, Kjaer Weis launched in 2010 with a range of foundations, blushers, and bronzers that simultaneously repaired skin while covering up past damage. The key ingredient of the brand’s signature Face Oil is the ‘Root of Light,’ an herb native to China that is believed to restore Qi, or the body’s inner energy flow. §

INFORMATION

acuteart.com
111skin.co.uk 
kjaerweis.com

Recently launched, Earth Speakr urges global leaders and policymakers to listen to the voices of young people speaking up for their planet’s future. The project comprises an app, website and physical presentations, available in all 24 official languages of the EU and accessible globally.
 
Eliasson’s practice is deeply engaged with society and the environment, and this is not his first foray into AR. Earlier this year, he launched the Wunderkammer project, which saw users ‘bring the outside in’ through the artist’s intriguing collection of natural elements, from a radiating sun to an amicable puffin.

People of all ages can download the free Earth Speakr app and see their environment transform through playful AR technology. Users first design a face which mirrors the expressions of their own. This can then merge with anything from a shoe, to a plastic bag, a tree or an entire building. Both entertaining and serious, the app aims to drum home the severity of the climate emergency and prick up the ears of those in power. Children and young people below the voting age can then record messages, quite literally on behalf of the planet, and share their thoughts globally via the Earth Speakr network.

‘What Earth Speakr will become depends on the Earth Speakrs – their creativity and imagination. The artwork is made up of their thoughts and visions, concerns and hopes’, explains Eliasson. ‘What they create can be playful and whimsical, serious, or poetic. There is no right or wrong, and it is easy for everyone to take part. Earth Speakr invites kids to speak their hearts and minds and participate in shaping our world and the planet, today and in the future.’

Earth Speakr gives kids the floor, and adults the chance to listen. It sees the next generation become both artists and spokespeople for their planet, and have a great deal of fun in the process.

INFORMATION

earthspeakr.art

olafureliasson.net

Bowlfuls of carbon-conscious, seasonal, and vegetarian fayre greet guests gathered for ‘Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life’ at Tate Modern’s Terrace Bar. If you’ve come to get closer to the globally recognised star-artist, to understand him ‘IRL', breaking bread is the place to start.

These bowls go deep. They represent Studio Olafur Eliasson’s message – of sustainability, community and experimentation – in its most elemental form. The Berlin studio (which comprises craftsmen, architects, archivists, filmmakers, administrators, cooks), is famed for its communal approach, typified by the daily lunches, cooked and eaten family-style on long benches. Think wholemeal sourdough and beet soup for the soul.

The exhibition packs bellyfuls in. A 39m corridor of dense fog; 450 models, prototypes, and geometrical studies from the artist’s studio; a huge wall of reindeer moss from Finland – it’s an ambitious mesh of Eliasson’s three-decade long exploration of (among other things) climate change.

Outside, a dramatic Waterfall (2019) installation measures over 11m in height, with its exoskeleton of pumps and pipes on display. It’s positioned not far from where Ice Watch (an installation of glacial ice from Greenland) stood in December 2018, in a poignant curatorial decision that reflects the fragility of melting ice caps. Inside, the theme ruminates. One of the quieter exhibits, a series of photographs of Iceland’s glaciers taken by the artist in 1999, will be replaced in the autumn by a new artwork that incorporates the old series alongside photos taken 20 years on, illustrating the changes in this landscape that are happening now.

In a continuation of his Tate takeover – which, for the institution, no doubt presents exciting opportunities to replicate the blinding success of Eliasson's glowing sun, that attracted more than two million people in 2003 – a city of white Lego will be dropped into the Turbine Hall later this month, upon which visitors can unleash their inner architect.

INFORMATION

‘Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life’, until 5 January 2020, Tate Modern. tate.org.uk

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

It's a brisk 1°C on London's Southbank. The sun has just touched the Switch House, and is hastily creeping towards 24 ice boulders arranged at the front of Tate Modern. They're already melting. Great blue-white tears collect in sad puddles, that will eventually glissade into the Thames and vanish.

This is no festive cocktail-inspired installation, and these are no ordinary ice-cubes. This is the third iteration of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson's Ice Watch, an artistic endeavour that aims to draw attention to Greenland's melting ice caps. It debuted in Copenhagen in 2014, and was exhibited in Paris the following year. It's arrival in London marks Eliasson's first outdoor installation in the city, and precedes a major retrospective of his work, expected to be a highlight of Tate Modern's 2019 calendar.

The morning chill of 1°C snaps at the extremities, as if nature is trying to remind us that the earth's temperature has risen by approximately this much since the turn of the 20th century – and it's ever increasing. Created in collaboration with Minik Rosing, professor of geology at the Natural History Museum of Copenhagen and Denmark, Ice Watch aims to make the impact of climate change a more immediate, physical experience. ‘Since 2015, the melting of ice in Greenland has raised global sea level by 2.5mm,' he explains. ‘Eventually, Greenland's ice waters will flow through the Thames.' This violent destruction of nature is happening silently, almost imperceptively around us. Ice Watch forces us to look.

These particular shards of ice were taken from the waters of the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland, where they were melting into the ocean after having been lost from the ice sheet. As well as being messengers with political motive, and objects of protest, they are things of striking beauty. Like slabs of marble, each has its own personality: some are near transcluscent, others densely opaque; some have lightly cratered surfaces, others are ice-rink slick. One has a near-neon lightning strike running through its centre. Eliasson predicts it will take around four days for these glacial chunks – some of them truck-sized – to all but disappear. ‘Gather your family, your children, and bring them quickly if they want to see it,’ he advises, poignantly, unintentionally, drawing attention to the speed in which Greenland's ices will slip away from us.

To see these things of ethereal natural beauty drip into nothing is what Justine Simons, London's deputy mayor for culture and the creative industries, calls a ‘visceral experience'. It's also jarringly sad, evoking a very real sense of loss. By positioning icebergs as art objects we can touch and connect with, we imbue them with the kind of emotion difficult to apply to scientific abstractions, statistics, or political rhetoric. As the COP24 climate change conference in Katowice, Poland gets under way, having a physical embodiment of environmental disaster thrust in front of us is more important than ever.

A dog splashes a ball through the rapidly forming puddle waterway, a young couple take a wintry selfie, a coterie of school children scratch at the icey edges in gloved hands, cawing ‘Is it real?'. I wonder if the message is sinking in. Yes, it's real. ‘Ten thousand chunks of ice this size disappear every second,' Eliasson reminds us. ‘We must recognise that together we have the power to take individual actions and to push for systemic change. Let's transform climate knowledge into climate action.'

INFORMATION

Ice Watch can be found outside Tate Modern, and outside the Bloomberg HQ in the City of London.

Until 21 December, weather conditions depending. For more information, visit the Studio Olafur Eliasson website

The most comprehensive survey of Olafur Eliasson's career to date has been published by Phaidon, conceived in close collaboration with the artist and his studio team, offering a broad yet detailed overview of the renowned artist's 30-year oeuvre.

To see an Eliasson exhibition, though visually indelible and very often moving, is to witness specially selected arms of his creative practice. Olafur Eliasson: Experience succinctly brings the artist's myriad ideas, installations, architecture, performances, philosophies and philanthropies, (a catalogue of achievement difficult to express fully under one roof) together, under one, bright yellow cover.

‘To make art, for me, is to be in dialogue with the world,' the artist writes in an interview with his longtime collaborator Anna Engberg-Pedersen. ‘Looking at art – or meeting up with art, as I sometimes say – requires a blending of perception, emotion and cognition that I find relevant to almost everything we – as people – do.' Through interviews, texts by and about Eliasson, alongside never-before-seen photographs of his Berlin studio, we ‘meet up with' Eliasson's work personally and profoundly, as if tracking the globe exhibition-hopping and architectural site-seeing.

To understand Eliasson's 100-strong Berlin team is to understand the way he works, thinks, and creates. Famed for its community atmosphere, the studio sprawls across four floors of a converted 19th-century brewery, now piled high with books, archive works and objects in progress. All staff sit down together for ‘daily vegetarian meals' from a kitchen that ‘works to promote sustainable healthy cooking'. The new photo-essay included in Experience reveals the studio to be a wildly collaborative laboratory of experiment, failure and success. It features and references the vital work of the craftspeople, administrative staff, cooks and researchers; giving them a moment in the yellow-hued spotlight, which is so often trained directly on Eliasson. 

The book concludes with a valuable chronology that spans ten pages in tiny type, and makes for engaging reading, from the project's names and descriptions, alongside influential personal milestones like his ‘first visit to Berlin' in 1989. Here, line by line, the real scope of Eliasson and Studio Olafur Eliasson's achievement falls into sharp relief. From 1999's statement-making Green river, which involved pouring soluble green dye into rivers and waterways, to 2014's Ice Watch, which brought enormous blocks of glacial ice to public squares in Copenhagen and Paris, making palpable the urgency of climate change, Eliasson has done the rare thing of captivating both the art world, and the world at large.

INFORMATION

Olafur Eliasson: Experience, published by Phaidon. For more information, visit the website

On 11 August, chef Victoria Eliasdóttir and her brother, artist Olafur Eliasson, are opening a culinary space in Reykjavik, hosted by Marshall House. Running until November 2018, the temporary restaurant will serve lunch and dinner, inspired by the atmosphere of the Studio Olafur Eliasson (SOE) Kitchen in Berlin, in direct response to the Icelandic context.

Marshall House – a fish factory turned art hub, converted by local architects Ási Sturluson and Steinþór Kárason of Kurt og Pí in 2017 – is an unlikely cultural haven, hidden in Reykjavik’s industrial port neighbourhood; an up-and-coming magnet for creative spaces. Eliasson's only Icelandic studio, located on the second floor, is a star attraction among locally run art initiatives, and an existing bar and restaurant. Because of the area's burgeoning art scene, Marshall House is often frequented by academics, designers and writers, catching a quick bite or private view; alongside adventurous tourists who pile off liners, daring to stray a little further from the docking bay.

In everything but locale, the pop-up embodies the ethos of Eliasson's Berlin kitchen, which is currently reserved for his 100-strong studio team. ‘It’s been a wish of mine (and many others) that the food at the Studio Olafur Eliasson (SOE) Kitchen in Berlin will be accessible to the public,’ explains Eliasdóttir. ‘SOE Kitchen 101 in Reykjavik is an experiment on how to bring the nature of the communal studio lunches out of a working space and into a place where a broad variety of guests will dine together while experiencing the spirit of the Berlin-based studio through both food and art.’

In line with Eliasson's philosophy of food – that taste is a key sense through which we experience the world – the project aims to facilitate thinking, as much as consuming; a safe space for experimentation and impromptu encounters. To aid this creative atmosphere, artworks by Eliasson with their imposing, light-refracting, almost healing qualities, will be peppered round the dining table, bolstering its atmosphere of artful eating.

Each sitting, Eliasdóttir and the SOE Kitchen team will invite guests to join a long table, upon which healthy food and conversation will flow – much in the spirit of the daily lunches that are served family-style to Eliasson’s studio kitchen in Berlin. Eliasdóttir has prepared a special menu based on recipes popular with the Berlin team, with the added benefit of local Icelandic produce. ‘For the last few weeks I have been visiting farmers on the south west corner and from their produce our menu is built,’ Eliasdóttir explains. Think an abundance of seafood, earthy native herbs like yarrow, and warming bowls of fresh pasta.

The project is an interdisciplinary adventure, an apt reflection of both Eliasdóttir and Eliasson's work, which jumps the narrowing divides between art, food and social initiative. Eliasdóttir hopes it will attract a visitor base that represents this diversity, gathering people ‘from different places, for different reasons.' It also bridges two cultures dear to Eliasson's heart – who split his childhood between Denmark and Iceland, before setting up home in Berlin. As he explained during a conversation earlier this year, ‘I see myself as both Icelandic, Danish and German, but before that, as native to the world.’ Kitchen 101 is an invitation for other global natives to join him, breaking boundaries by breaking bread.

INFORAMTION

SOE Kitchen 101 opens 11 August 2018. For more information, visit the Marshall House website

ADDRESS

SOE Kitchen 101, Marshall House 

Grandagarður 20 

101 Reykjavík

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

A new sculptural form rises from the industrial docks of Vejle in Denmark. The Fjordenhus is the first ‘total’ piece of architecture from Olafur Eliasson which combines – and blurs the boundaries between – art, architecture and design. Inside the building, site-specific art works and specially designed furniture and lighting are all designed by Studio Olafur Eliasson.

It may look like a post-neo-romantic brick folly – creatively avoiding any association with a standard architectural typology – however, it serves as a headquarters for the Kirk Kapital, a local family-run business working across agricultural, industry and cultural sectors. The ground floor of the building is a publicly accessible space that is an atmospheric void and a viewing platform for the fjord and the surrounding docklands.

Four brick cylinder shapes merge to form the organic main structure. Soaring arches are scooped out to carve entranceways and openings at ground level sheltered balconies for the upper floors. Within the context of the active industrial docklands – where heaps of gravel, stacks of timber pile up in yards, open warehouses reveal steelworkers sparks – it’s impossible not to think of industrial architectural forms. And similar industrial waterfront cultural buildings such as Heatherwick’s MOCAA or Herzog & De Meuron’s brick-based Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg.

‘I was happy to reference the industrial history of silos and energy containers, but the circle also has this idea of the meeting space and the parliament – the circle being a shared space,’ says Olafur Eliasson of the design. ‘Each of the three (Kirk) brothers have their own spheres and then there is a sphere in the middle that connects them.’

The Kirk family wanted a building that would celebrate the Vejle fjord, nature, the seasons and the ephemeral quality of the water, and share that with the community. They also wanted the building to play a leading part of the revitalisation of the Vejle docklands. The first job for Olafur Eliasson Studio was to design a masterplan for the dockland area, an artificial piece of land built 200 years ago for industry of the Jutlands. The team decided to take the Fjordenhus off the land and into the water. Building on the water in Denmark is nothing new to a country with 7000 km of coastline, explained Eliasson, yet the choice was also part of the celebration of the qualities of the water.

This move also opened up space for a broad cobbled public square and uninterrupted views from Vejle’s high street straight out to the fjord and the graceful 1712-metre-long Vejle Fjord Bridge. The public square is a place to be ‘aimless’ and ‘foolish’ in says Eliasson: ‘A lot of public space has become obsessed with control and defining normality as a certain type of behaviour – a little bit like museums. The lack of diversity in behaviour you see in museums is unbelievable, everybody is becoming robots.’

Eliasson commissioned a long, tapering jetty designed by landscape architect Gunter Vogt that extends from the square towards the fjord. Vogt is a long-term friend and mentor to Eliasson, who describes him as a ‘great humanist and a great protestant: I love his very minimalist and down to earth approach, he is a great source of inspiration.’

This very Danish approach to a humanistic architecture is clear across the ground floor level of the Fjordenhus, a space that Eliasson underlines as a ‘public accessible’ space instead of a ‘public’ space: ‘The idea was for contemplative space, or a space where we can celebrate the atmospheric conditions – the quality of the air and the wind.’ Eliasson admits that this is something he needs to ‘learn’ to speak about, because the qualities of this space are actually beyond language.

‘This is something I’m working on,’ he says. ‘My work has been about that for a while and I love it, I love nature. But loving nature is not enough. We need to harvest, harness, protect, and organise it. We need to acknowledge that the so-called atmospheric spaces in our lives have also become political and economical. These so-called “non-quantifiables” will define our lives in the future. I’m not a climate scientist, but as an artist, what I’m trying to say is that wind is not just poetry.’

‘The wind is annoying, but it’s part of the eco-system that drives the clouds and the sun, the light and everything around. We should learn that the wind is not only going to be one of the significant energy drivers of the future, but it’s also amazing because it allows us to feel the invisible. It is the way to detect an empty space, and its something we need to work a lot harder on understanding, because that thing is also called the climate.’

The ground floor opens up a honeycomb of brick arches and voids. The geometry of the architecture balances an inner circle with an outer elipse to create a feeling of ‘tilting’ and ‘leaning’ offering a ‘constant negotiation’ between space and visitor. It provides multiple options and eliminates the neo-classical agenda of Panopticism says Eliasson, who explains that the experience goes beyond phenomenology.

‘We need these non-prescriptive spaces. It’s not actually empty, it’s full of opportunity. We need to dare to claim it and say this is nobody’s space. If you go to Brazil, every street corner has a multiplicity of activities; the Italian piazzas used to be these meeting points for the community, kids going to school – I like this idea of a street parliament. Denmark being so unbelievably socially robust, there are no street parliaments – it’s a longer discussion, and one I don’t have the answer to.’

Visible from the bridge, the intriguing form of the Fjordenhus will no doubt draw architecturally curious Eliasson fans down into Vejle for a stroll. Thus the building also plays the role of a cultural lighthouse.

When you reach the flat, open cobbled square, and move closer, you will see the detailing of the brick-work, the buildings’ most beautiful feature. Eliasson describes the brickwork as ‘expressionistic’ where ‘hidden murals’ swell and disappear into the walls. He wanted the brickwork to express how it was made by human hands, and he hopes that eventually a seed with find its way onto a ledge to soften the form with some nature. In the studio, the team formed the colour scheme and patterns of the bricks, working with Peterson brick contractors for the work. Glazed green bricks are scattered close to the base of the building while higher up glossy blue-glazed bricks connect the building to the sky.

While the Fjordenhus is a first for Eliasson and his studio, architecture isn’t a new realm. Eliasson is very familiar with space and building. His installations often move beyond walls such as at his rainbow panoramic corridor at the Aarhus Kunst Museum (2011), the reflective, cellular facades for Iceland’s Harpa concert hall (2013) and his reflective colonnade at the Louis Vuitton Foundation (2014).

The Fjordenhus was an opportunity for Eliasson to bring together the knowledge and experience of his studio – the processes of making, building exhibitions, researching materials and collaborating with a trusted network of technicians and engineers, yet also designing a narrative, making an atmosphere, working with light.

Architect Sebastian Behmann, worked closely with Eliasson on the project and has been working with him since 2001, now holding the position of head of the department of design. Behmann jokes that this is Studio Olafur Eliasson’s first, and last, total building project, as the pair have co-founded Studio Other Spaces, to take on further architectural commissions.

As an artist, Eliasson has the ability to approach architecture a unique way – perhaps favouring form over function, daring to building a non-functional space, happily ignoring typology. Yet, while an architect may prickle at the very sound of this approach, Eliasson makes some eloquent and necessary statements about the environment, public space and beauty with his Fjordenhus and he certainly knows how to harness an atmosphere.

For more information, visit the Studio Olafur Eliasson website and the SOS (Studio Other Spaces) website

It took two years for Australian jewellery brand Sarah & Sebastian to find the snug location for its first flagship store in Paddington, Sydney. ‘We knew we wanted something small scale with a lot of light,’ says co-founder Sarah Gittoes of the narrow floor-to-ceiling glass space, once destined to be a café or dessert bar.

Obsessed with the intricacies of retail design – like the cupboards and shelves which would be used to display Sarah & Sebastian’s handcrafted pieces – Sarah Gittoes and co-founder Robert Sebastian Grynkofki, who established the brand in 2011, teamed up with Sydney-based architect Mark Landini to realise their retail vision. ‘I remember leaving our first meeting feeling so excited,’ Sarah Gittoes says. ‘He turned all of our ideas on their heads.’

The brand’s preoccupation with the physicalisation of product was deftly inverted, with Landini suggesting Sarah & Sebastian use two-way mirrored cabinets to display their designs, inspired by disparate influences including Olafur Eliasson, Sol LeWitt, Fred Sandback, and deep sea diving. On entry, customers are simply faced with walls lined with mirrored surfaces. Only when they request their areas of interest – price point, a bespoke commission, an engagement ring – do the mirrors turn to glass, revealing the designs within.

‘When you walk into the store everything is concealed’, Grynkofki says. The concept, which is controlled by a bespoke lighting system, encourages an immersive customer experience, inspiring them to interact with the space and unearth the secrets of its design. ‘We didn’t want the boutique to reveal all everything at once, which you get with e-commerce sites,’ Sarah Gittoes says. ‘When we had a pop-up store in our Sydney showroom we found that customers had already researched online exactly what they wanted to buy.’

The duo was motivated to open their first flagship after they opened their local studio to the public, and found that customers were reluctant to leave. ‘They were so fascinated to see our jewellers at work,’  Sarah Gittoes explains. The brand’s boutique aims to bring the wonders of the workshop in. Its copper inlay custom built sales desk doubles up as a jewellery bench. ‘It's that level of exploration which really enhances the customer experience,’ confirms  Sarah Gittoes.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Sarah & Sebastian’s website

ADDRESS

Kiosk 261/265
Oxford St
Paddington NSW 2021
Australia

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Following exhibitions by artists Tomàs Saraceno, Sheila Hicks and Edmund de Waal, the privately funded space Espace Muraille, Geneva, welcomes a solo exhibition by Olafur Eliasson. Entitled ‘Objets définis par l’activité’ (‘Objects defined by activity’), the show brings together a selection of 18 artworks which highlight, together and separately, Eliasson’s research on time, perception, space, movement, and the relativity of reality. Unique in its form, the project was initiated by Laurence Dreyfus; it took the independent curator almost five years to bring this projects to life with the support of private collectors Caroline and Eric Freymond (patrons of the arts and founders of Espace Muraille).

For Dreyfus, Eliasson embodies the universal artist. ‘Eliasson confronts the finitude of the human being with the idea of a vast, expansive universe. He embodies light and optimism at the same time. He thinks about the present, imagines the future and dreams of what is coming next,’ says the curator. ‘His art form, in a way, is related to cosmology in that his vision is broad and humane. Eliasson is a generous soul who connects human beings. He is a thinker who believes solutions can be found to craft a better world.’

We caught up with Eliasson in Geneva to find out more about his Espace Muraille exhibition...

Wallpaper*: Would you say your work is related to the outside or inner world?
Olafur Eliasson: The world we live in is relative; we are guided through it by our senses. I want the visitor to be the producer rather than the consumer of (a) reality. The works shown here amplify the perception of the space and objects in front of us; they reflect on ‘how’ and ‘why’ we see things this way rather than ‘what’ we see.

For example, the Wavelength lamp (2018) breaks the light into a sequence, and The we mirror (2017) forces the eye into a 3D geometric composition, yet both play with the perception we have of their structure. All that to say our perception of the world is easily fooled: I want to reveal the tricks, highlight the way the media or politicians wrongly address certain issues. I want them to act as advocates for transparency.

W*: You often speak about ‘embodying the work’, what do you refer to?
OE: I always try to work with and around physical elements to create emotions and sensations that stick with the viewer. Social media, on the opposite, generates disembodiment. With the fountains exposed on the lower floor – Objects defined by activity (now), (then) and (soon), 2009 – water and strobe light play together to create a form of timelessness. Perception shifts, a new horizon comes to life: it isn’t a line; it can’t be grasped. The strobe light makes the invisible visible, and the piece itself creates a ‘space’ where simple rules are challenged.

When you combine data with action, you start to influence the viewer: the later becomes the producer of his own reality rather than being the victim of it. I know it is very much a Scandinavian ideal, but these works hint at our capacity, and ability to change the world. All of my work is based on the process of turning a ‘thinking’ into a ‘doing’!

W*: How do geometry, perspective and direction inform your work?
OE: I love the eclipse shape. Did you know that unlike a square, it doesn’t deform in perspective? Confronted with it, in perspective, you can’t sense the depth of the space. I like to play with the idea of challenging perceptions, or reflections, and geometry offers endless possibilities. Many might think that when you enter the art world, you step out of the ‘real’ world. But it is very much the opposite: with amplified sensations, one can connect even closer with the world and its current issues. The geometric and colour spectrum compass (Everywhere compass, 2017) hanging above the staircase it there to orient us in a precise direction. The same goes for the Day and night lava, 2017 in which a dark lava stone half painted in white rotates before a concave mirror: it projects the reflection of the white side when the viewer is faced with the black side. You start looking wit intensity, questioning what you are seeing, going back and forth.

W*: Water, light, stone – the sun is also a key part of your visual language. Can you talk to us about Little Sun?
OE: Little Sun recently became a foundation and we are getting more and more involved in Africa through three different channels. Private vendors that help distribute the lamps at a much lower price than in Europe (the profits made in Europe serve as subsidies to reduce the price of the lamps). NGOs are also helping with the distribution of Little Sun which is expanding rapidly; we recently signed with the International Office of Migrants (ION), to make Little Sun available in refugee camps. Finally, we are partnering with local governments and schools to improve general education. Our hope is also to put a ‘pay as you go’ system in place to make it easier for families to lease the lamps.

My team and I met with the UNPD this morning to discuss further developments. At this stage we have sold 600,000 lamps (the two thirds of which in Africa), and we know, through studies, that a lamp increases the time dedicated to homework by one hour every day. The impact is real and we are hoping it continues to grow, to empower more and more children, especially little girls who benefit the most from such improvements and can study more.

INFORMATION

‘Objets définis par l’activité’ is on view until 28 April. For more information, visit the Espace Muraille website

ADDRESS

Espace Muraille
Place des Casemates 5
1204 Geneva

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It’s hard for anything to stay hidden for long in Reykjavik. With a population of 120,000, the highstreet feels like a backstreet (albeit a quaintly beautiful one), and everyone knows everyone.

In the even less-trodden industrial area to the northwest of the city, where cranes and fish trawlers rhythmically churn up the harbour, and a tinny, sulfurous smell fills the air, a recently converted herring factory is quietly setting the citywide standard in art, architecture and design.

Marshall House was converted by local architects Ási Sturluson and Steinþór Kárason of Kurt og Pí earlier this year in an undertaking they describe as ‘the project of a lifetime’. Almost ten years in planning, and one in the making, the conversion was riddled with difficulties.

The city council keeps a close eye on the heritage of the area, and has already banned new hotels from popping up. Required by regulators to retain the white, window-lined shell, Kurt og Pí had to work from the inside out to create a viable space to show art – still tricky with so many windows and such little blank wallspace. They accomodated this by creating temporary partition walls within the vast, light-filled warehouses. To wit, they had to dig out the original 1948 flooring to fully eradicate the smell of herring.

Tucked away at the top of an impressive concrete staircase – with railings repurposed from the factory’s original steel framework – is the satellite studio of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. Berlin has long been the artist’s primary site for artistic production, where Studio Olafur Eliasson is large enough to house a dedicated project team and a range of passing interdisciplinary collaborators. In comparison, the Reykjavik studio is a small, informal cluster of rooms; a space for thinking and experimentation in direct response to the Icelandic context.

‘Opening a satellite studio in Reykjavik is, for me, a very natural step,’ Eliasson says. ‘I’ve always felt emotionally connected to Iceland; its landscape and unique light conditions have been a strong source of inspiration, and an environment in which to test artistic ideas – almost like a studio situation itself.’

From the studio’s eastern-facing windows, Eliasson can look across the harbour, to one of his larger creations – the façade of Harpa Concert and Conference Centre, which opened in 2011. Intimately connecting the two buildings, and celebrating the unique light-quality that seems to hang between them in the bay, Eliasson has designed custom light fittings for his new studio, from the same glass as the blue-green windows of the concert hall.

Thanks to management from Börkur Arnarson – the owner of i8 Gallery, Eliasson’s Icelandic representation – the new studio is also open to the public. In a very community-focused, Icelandic way, locals use it as a place to sit, talk and create.

Marshall House is also home to two locally important, grassroots art institutions, Kling & Bang and The Living Arts Museum – both of which struggled to maintain their flagship locations elsewhere in the city in the aftermath of Iceland’s economic crisis. Marshall House scooped them up, and gave them free reign to develop their spaces as they wished. The latter is currently showing an exhibition of its ‘disordered library’ of 800 first-edition art books, collected over the last 40 years.

Downstairs, an open-plan café, level with the ocean at high tide, serves fresh seafood and great apéro to visitors. It also doubles as an off-the-beaten-track watering hole for local artists. With his studio space just around the corner, Ragnar Kjartansson is said to be a regular.

The artist-run, artist-first factory is a symbol of, and commitment to, Iceland’s home-grown creativity. Commercial galleries are still fairly uncommon in the city, and community-led projects take precedent. Still, few are as far-reaching and generous as Marshall House’s beautifully designed 1,800 sq ft space, which would be a treat for artists and visitors alike in the busiest of capital cities.

INFORMATION

Open Tuesdays to Sundays 12–6pm, and until 9pm on Thursdays. For more information, visit the Studio Olafur Eliasson website and I8 gallery website

ADDRESS

Grandagarður 20
101 Reykjavík

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As far as Erlend G. Høyersten, director of Denmark’s lauded Aros Aarhus Art Museum, is concerned, there’s never been a better time to unveil an ambitious art triennial. 'Not only does the museum’s inaugural fair coincide with Aarhus’s year-long celebrations as the European City of Culture,' he says. 'But, perhaps more vitally, the role that art plays in our society has never felt more important. Hopefully these works can affect change,' he adds.

The triennial, titled 'The Garden: End of Times, Beginning of Times', examines mankind’s complex relationship with nature over the past 400 years. 'World views, such as religion, politics, science and culture have manifested themselves in man-made natural landscapes for centuries,' notes Høyersten, adding, 'We hope this gives visitors a new understanding of nature.'

The exhibition is separated into three parts: 'The Past', 'The Present' and' The Future'. 'The Past', which opened at the start of April, is situated within the confines of the museum and traces how nature has manifested itself within art. Classical landscape paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain brush shoulders with poignant contemporary works by the likes of German photographer Thomas Struth, Swiss visual artist Pamela Rosenkranz and Icelandic-Danish icon, Olafur Eliasson.

The remaining two themes were rolled out in and around the capital, sparking a stimulating dialogue between art, environment and audience. California-based Doug Aitken, for example, choose to house his multi-layered sculpture, The Garden, inside a secluded industrial warehouse near the docks. The participatory piece allows volunteers to channel their inner Alex DeLarge and smash up the contents – generic white tables, chairs, sofas – of a glass anger room. This aggressive space, which broadcasts a live stream of footage from six cameras, is tempered by an outer ring of lush vegetation, which, he states, 'creates a tension between the natural and synthetic environment.'

Elsewhere, emerging French artist Cyprien Gaillard transformed the toilets of graffiti-strewn student bar – Shen Mao – with an opulent marble terrazzo floor, flecked with fragments of mother-of-pearl oyster shells. 'With Understory, [Gaillard] has created a link between the toilet and its drains to the natural life existing in Danish waters,' muses Marie Nipper, external curator of 'The Present and The Future'. While in calmer shores, US sculptor Meg Webster calls for an urgent response to the decline in pollinators across the US and Europe with Concave Room For Bees, an ecological sculpture that she cultivated close to the coastline using native flowers, grasses and herbs. She hopes the work will 'attract butterflies, bees, insects and all kinds of pollinators to the site.'

On a different note, Bjarke Ingels Group aims to lift spirits and spread social cheer with their colossal, cloud-like mobile sculpture, ‘SKUM’. Inspired by 'a love of trampolines and bouncy castles,' the bubbly pavilion provides a space for people to interact and enjoy the bucolic views of the park in which its placed. Katharina Grosse's untitled garden painting proves equally exuberant. Using raspberry red and white acrylic paint, the popular German artist infiltrates the Mindeparken area of the park, including its bike lanes, beach and jetties, with a radical wash of unnatural colour that disrupts the landscape. 'It’s intrinsically casual, like scribbling with a felt pen on the edge of your shoes,' she explains. 'In that sense, scribbling is a gesture that interferes with the garden’s controlled principles of nature. I hope the work gives viewers a sense of freedom and uninhabited thinking.'

INFORMATION

’The Garden: End of Times, Beginning of Times’ runs until 10 September 2017. For more information, visit the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum 

website

ADDRESS

ARoS Aarhus Art Museum
DK-8000
Aarhus

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‘I could lose my heart to art,’ says Anya Hindmarch at Sotheby's, where she has curated an edit of ten pieces of contemporary art as part of its Contemporary Curated sale, which coincides with London Fashion Week. ‘My husband laughs at me because he thinks that one day I'll come home with a piece of art that I've remortgaged the house to get.’

Among Hindmarch's selection are pieces by Keith Haring, a neon pink and a black painting that she says she loves for its ‘energy and joy’, a photograph by Thomas Ruff, a large-scale light sculpture by Olafur Eliasson, and other paintings by Tracey Emin, Sam Francis and Anish Kapoor, among others.

‘It was really hard to choose the works. A few of the paintings I really reacted to, and really want on my [own] walls,’ she says. ‘Like the Haring, which I still want desperately, but others, like the Richter, which is a small photograph smeared with paint really grows and grows on you – it's small but so captivating. The Kapoor, with its two white spots, moves and morphs the longer you look at it.’

Hindmarch, who is a trustee of the Royal Academy and the Design Museum, describes herself as a ‘timid’ and ‘small-scale’ collector of art. ‘We operate a one-in-one-out policy at home. I have too many children to feed, house and educate to buy much more,’ she jokes. ‘And then there's a lack of wall space…’

Hindmarch said that she chose the works based on what she'd like to live with. ‘They are just pieces that I loved, that I'd want to have around me; I wasn't trying to think about how they would hang together,’ she says. ‘But, actually, they do work well as a group.’

Sotheby's head of Contemporary Curated London, Joanna Steingold, said the auction house had wanted to invite an inspirational female British tastemaker. Hindmarch, with her patronage and love of art was the perfect candidate. Steingold presented Hindmarch with a short list of about 30 pieces to make the final curated edit of ten.

‘The variety of styles that Anya chose was surprising,’ says Steingold. ‘With the playful mood of her collections, so bright and poppy, I expected her to choose more poppy pieces of art, but pieces like those by Wolfgang Tillmans and Ai Weiwei are very thoughtful and invite you to look twice to discover them.’

The designer said that there was a strong chance that she might walk away for the auction on Tuesday with one of the artworks, which would potentially join her own collection at home.

‘My favourite piece at home is a work by Chris Levine of The Queen with her eyes shut,’ she says. ‘It's hung in the drawing room and my kids are absolutely terrified of it; they're scared that at any moment she could open her eyes.’

Hindmarch's curated edit is the second time Sotheby's has invited a designer to guest curate for the auction. In March, fellow London-based designer Erdem Moralioglu also curated an edit for the Contemporary Curated series, which was first launched in the United States in 2013, and has since featured auctions guest-curated by American author and art collector James Frey, Tamara Mellon, Anna Sui and NFL player Keith Rivers.

But Steingold says that the next edition of the sale will probably see Sotheby's veer away from fashion designers. ‘We want to continue connecting and collaborating with leading tastemakers, and there's a lot of people on my wish list for a potential future guest curator,’ she explains, declining to name her targets, but suggesting that music or architecture could be fields from which they are drawn.

INFORMATION
For more information visit the Sotheby’s website

The pre-sale exhibition is open until Monday 19th September, with the auction scheduled for 10.30am on Tuesday 20th September

The Tanzania-born, London-based architect David Adjaye is a Wallpaper* favourite, not least because he was a judge for our 2016 Design Awards. He's a multifaceted practitioner who thinks like a conceptual artist, creating structures bristling with meaning and subtle geo-cultural references.

A new project, developed in collaboration with Adjaye's brother Peter – aka composer, DJ and recording artist AJ Kwame – delves deeper still into the interstitial realms between 21st century psychogeography and music.

Released this month by The Vinyl Factory and Music for Architecture, Dialogues is a limited edition collection of sonic explorations into David's architectural work. Different genres of music have always been inextricably tied to and redolent of the landscapes they developed in. But, outside of the fields of musique concrète and field recording, it's rare to hear an artist engage with the built landscape on a micro-level, attempting to express the tactile and conceptual nature of architecture in a medium as fundamentally intangible as sound.

Each of Peter's compositions is a direct response to one of David's buildings. 'What Peter does is "sound architecture",' David explains of the process. 'I give Peter a project and ask him to react. Architecture is a narrative. This project is like a DNA experiment. There’s a construction.'

Projects of this kind often err towards abstracted musical expression – noise, drone, Radiophonic-style soundscaping – but Peter plays fast and loose, incorporating cinematic string sections, 90s-style jazzy breaks and knowingly ersatz references to the musical vernacular of the countries some of these buildings are located in, or draw from. Still, it's the less conventional tracks that work best.

Take that written for Adjaye's and Olafur Eliasson's 'Your Black Horizon' pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale – a four minute sketch of lightly delayed cello, conceived as a musical response to an installation that 'takes its inspiration from the narrow light source that pervades the centre of the pavilion, which then goes through the cycle of the light spectrum as the narrow slits cut your viewpoint to the light source'. (Peter has supplied a detailed text response to accompany each track.)

Or 'Reflections of a Golden Dream', written for the Stephen Lawrence Centre in Deptford. Comprising banks of sombre string, a few synthetic drones and spare percussive clacks, it simultaneously evokes the inherent melancholy of the building, while also making manifest in sound the building's expansive glass panes, adorned with patterns by artist Chris Ofili.

Elsewhere, Peter responds to projects as diverse as The Upper Room (a wooden cubicle created for Ofili for a 2007 Tate Britain show); the Ideas Store in Whitechapel, which features a dreamy smorgasbord of lilting flutes, tabla and percussion; and David's spectacular wooden 'Genesis Pavilion', created for Design Miami 2011.

For this latter piece, Peter was asked to compose a soundscape that pavilion viewers could act with via a QR code on their phones. The track segues seamlessly from primordial field recording, through quirky filmic vocal passages and onto a more percussive, sinister finale.

'Architecture can also be expressed as a kind of movement (of light, sound, people…),' Peter explains, and the record 'is about how you can represent this fluidity, to bring it alive and create an immersive whole-body experience.'

Dialogues is an intriguing and highly original collection, affording Adjaye’s practice – already concerned with the human condition – an even greater emotional resonance.

INFORMATION

Dialogues, by Peter Adjaye and David Adjaye, £50, on Music for Architecture and The Vinyl Factory. For more information and ordering, visit The Vinyl Factory's website

Investing in the great expanse that is the Chateau de Versailles and its sprawling gardens is no mean feat, as the environment-focused Danish-Icelandic visual artist Olafur Eliasson found out. The artist, who has showcased his work around the world – most famously with The Weather Project at Tate Modern in 2003 and Ice Watch, which saw blocks of ice arranged in the shape of a clock in Paris during COP21 in 2015 – took several months to get a real sense of Versailles before attempting to tame its grandeur and create works for the project.

'I visited it several times, even at night. Every time I came here, I would see something new. It’s only after the first few times that I really dared to open doors and see what was behind the facade,' the artist told Wallpaper*. 'And I eventually felt I had some control over the masterplan, the intentionality of the layout.'

Every year, Versailles president Catherine Pégard invites a contemporary artist to put their spin on the 17th-century architectural masterpiece. Following in the footsteps of Anish Kapoor – who was commissioned last year – Eliasson has created eight works that question perception; five mirror-focused pieces that sit within the chateau and three that play on the elements in the gardens.

'It’s possible to pass the works without seeing them, just being seen by the works,' says the artist. Scale is key for Eliasson; unlike Kapoor’s monumental pieces, his works take a back seat in relation to the palace itself. Waterfall, in the Grand Canal, is the most noticeable work. 'The gardens’ scale ingenuously manipulates perception; you don’t know how long it will really take to walk from one point to other. But the falling water adds scale and temporality, because of the time it takes for the water to fall.'

Displacing perception of intention is one of the exhibition’s main themes. 'I want to encourage us to explore Versailles without there being a particular intention – not like in life where most things tend to be planned. I want people to really experience the works, even to be part of them,' says Eliasson. 'Changing our perceptions and perspectives of the world.'

INFORMATION

Olafur Eliasson at Versailles is on view until 30 October. For more information, visit the Chateau de Versailles website

Photography: Anders Sune Berg

ADDRESS

Chateau de Versailles
Place d'Armes
78000 Versailles

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In his 28 years, Julian Charrière has achieved more than most artists can hope to in a lifetime. Namely, winning Switzerland’s most prestigious art prize twice, presenting a major outdoor exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and creating work for the Venice Biennale. Next up on the Swiss-born artist’s agenda is his first UK solo show at the Parasol Unit, ’For They That Sow the Wind’.

Based in Berlin, where he trained at Olafur Eliasson’s Institute of Spatial Experiments, Charrière’s work has seen him travel to some of the most remote corners of the planet to gather inspiration and materials for his poetic works, that explore themes of time, the continuous cycle of past, present and future, ecology and human intervention.

Take for instance his photographic series Blue Fossil Entropic Stories, where we find Charrière in the Arctic Ocean atop a vast iceberg where, for eight hours, he unsuccessfully tried to sculpt its surface with a blow torch. Or Tropisme, an ode to the Cretaceous period, where a collection of orchids and cactuses known to have existed during this geological period have been shock frozen in liquid nitrogen and sealed in a refrigerated sealed glass vitrine.

As well as these celebrated works, the show at Parasol Unit, curated by its founder/director Ziba Ardalan, is set to include some new site-specific pieces. Visitors to the exhibition can also enjoy a full-colour publication that includes two insightful essays, one by contemporary philosopher Timothy Morton and the other by Ardalan herself, along with an interview with the artist.

INFORMATION

’Julian Charrière: For They That Sow the Wind’ is on view from 15 January–23 March 2016. For more information visit Parasol Unit’s website

ADDRESS

Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art
14 Wharf Road
London, N1 7RW

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This exhibition, says Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, started life as an exploratory collaboration between three different artistic perspectives: the institutional, in the form of the Baroque Belvadore Winter Palace in Vienna; private collections – the city’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) and Buenos Aires’ Juan and Patricia Vergez; and his own science-oriented studio. The result is a fascinating show of the artist’s 'new works made a long time ago', ''Baroque Baroque' which opened on 19 November.

The show – set amid the 16th century grandeur of the Winter Palace – is a meeting of art and world views from two very different eras, suggesting an unstable reality characterised by a constant process of evolution. 'I like Baroque, but I also like the Viennese clarity about Baroque; it’s not just romantic and nostalgic, it’s a very crisp and contemporary interpretation in general here,' Eliasson says. 'The staging of Baroque is actually very much not taking people away into a dream, but saying the dream is actually here in our daily lives. I like it very much because you can be pragmatic and dream at the same time.'

The experience begins at the entrance hall, where the light installation Die Organische und Kristalline Beschreibung (1996) saturates the space with blue and yellow light that diminishes one’s sense of stability. At the staircase leading to the main exhibition hall, the monochromatic Yellow Corridor (1997) provides visitors with an enhanced awareness of the show in front of them.

Among the artworks on the main floor is a 30-metre long mirror traversing the enfilade of the grand rooms. The chief curator of 21er Haus, Mario Codognato, who is behind the show – the Winter Palace’s first contemporary art monograph – says: 'The mirror is the most extraordinary thing that happened in the exhibition, it connected and transformed the entire space and at the same time charged his works with a new energy.' The mirror further disorients the viewers by folding and refolding the complex spaces it produces, it also creates an extra dimension by making them part of the setting among the artworks. To experience merging of reality and illusion at its outmost, go to the Hall of Battle Paintings to see the Wishes Versus Wonders (2015), where a brass ring that is half real, half reflection plays uncanny tricks with the space.

TBA21 has also announced its next collaboration with Eliasson – 'Green Light' – which will be launched next February. The three-month workshop at Augarten will be a response to the current refugee crisis and the precarious processes of displacement and migration.

INFORMATION

'Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque' runs until 6 March 2016. For more information, visit Olafur Eliasson's website

ADDRESS

Himmelpfortgasse 8
1010 Wien
Oostenrijk

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The community-geared Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut, which opened earlier this month, might be best recognised for its stunning ‘River’ building and untainted natural landscape, but within the SANAA-designed structure’s curving glass walls and nestled around its grounds is an equally noteworthy collection of specially commissioned artwork to be discovered.

Dedicated to bringing together communities, exploring areas of justice and spirituality and pitting itself as a center for learning, Grace Farms and its foundation have created a space armed with facilities that well surpasses other community-oriented gathering spaces. Its art collection is no different, with pieces from Thomas Demand, Olafur Eliasson, Teresita Fernandez, Susan Philipsz and Beatriz Milhazes on display.

Grace Farms’ collection has been curated by its curatorial advisor Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and a regular collaborator of SANAA’s. 'Art is both an opportunity to share an experience with others, and an pportunity for self-reflection,' she states. 'One of the key elements discussed during the conceptual process of this project was how best to bring together SANAA’s architectural language with the works on view.'

The results couldn’t be more in tune with the impression that Grace Farms leaves behind. In the library, two large photographic pieces by Thomas Demand, ‘Farm 56’ and ‘Farm 88’, depict the design evolution of the River building through SANAA’s architectural models – very much in the same vein of what Demand presented at his recent 'Latent Forms' exhibition in London. 'My contribution tries to show the richness of the creative process and the eminent role modeling played in the design of the building in which the work is installed,' the artist says.

In the dining hall, known as the Commons, Teresita Fernandez has created ‘Double Glass River’, a fluid configuration of small glass cubes installed on a curved wall that reflect different views of both the viewer and the surrounding landscape as its passed. Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Mat for Multidimensional prayers’ – thick woven mats made from Icelandic sheep’s wool - cuts a poignant figure on the stage in the building’s Sanctuary, while a sound installation by Glaswegian artist Susan Philipsz that’s inspired by musical annotation originating from Conneticut fills the air around a small pond in the woods.

With new site specific pieces from Eliasson and the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes to be unveiled in 2016, there will be even more reasons to keep coming back for a visit.

ADDRESS

Grace Farms
365 Lukes Wood Road
New Canaan, Connecticut

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When American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer published Tree of Codes, in 2010, it stumped critics. The publication – part book, part sculpture, part poetry – saw Foer write a story not by putting words to paper, but by removing words from another text: Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles. The result is a paperback rife with excisions, what choreographer Wayne McGregor calls ‘a beautiful architectural object’.

After reading the book, McGregor became determined to produce this architectural object as a performance, so he choreographed it in creative partnership with Olafur Eliasson, who came up with a visual concept, and Jamie xx, who composed the music. Over the course of a weeklong run, the Park Avenue Armory in New York staged the 90-minute performance that resulted from this coming-together of three people at the top of their artistic fields. Like the book that inspired it, Tree of Codes, as a performance, defies easy category – part dance, part art installation, and part music event.

Eliasson’s set, positioned at the centre of the Armory’s vast drill hall, produces a colourful and kinetic stage. A mirrored backdrop folds into itself, creating a kaleidoscopic effect, while a scrim that divides the stage is both reflective and transparent, allowing dancers on each side of it to be reflected in different ways. In the prismatic lighting and stage colours, audience members will recognise Eliasson’s influence – also on display with an installation before the performance starts that projects the silhouettes of passersby as repeated shadows tinted with the full colour spectrum.

In what has become an ambitiously versatile arts venue, the Armory will round out its 2015 season with an installation by Laurie Anderson and a performance by Marina Abramović with pianist Igor Levit. Throughout it all, work continues on restoring the 19th century building, under the design direction of Herzog & de Meuron.

INFORMATION

Photography: Stephanie Berger

ADDRESS

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue
New York City, NY 10065

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Installation artist, sculptor, filmmaker and photographer Olafur Eliasson has long put a new spin on space, volume and perception in a variety of mediums internationally. Who can forget his 2007 Serpentine, when together with Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, he turned out a spinning top-like building drenched in light or his 2008 cascading ‘New York City Waterfalls’?

But rather than water, light and air, this time around Eliasson took on a decidedly novel material - Lego bricks, the ubiquitous Danish plastic building blocks for his ‘The collectify project’ on Chelsea’s Highline overlooking the Hudson River. Made up of a staggering one million white Lego bricks weighing two tons, Eliasson has created an imaginary cityscape as well as a commentary on urban development.

And that project is hardly mere child’s play as he called on architects Annabelle Selldorf, Renzo Piano’s Building Workshop, Robert A. M. Stern and other firms as part of the team for his visionary project. In their hands, they constructed miniature buildings on vast tables.

Selldorf, who fine tuned the Fifth Avenue Neue Galerie and has designed a slew of art galleries from Hauser & Wirth to David Zwirner, says, 'I thought of introducing the idea of the labyrinth which represents an archetypal space. It took on a life of its own with everyone contributing different aspects and looked very beautiful to me.'

Right opposite Selldorf’s labyrinth, Stern’s office created a miniature forty-story skyscraper while Renzo Piano replicated a just destroyed temple in Katmandu.

Of this idiosyncratic work, Eliasson notes, 'The collectivity project is an invitation to co-produce space.'

And now, the public have been invited to build on top of this miniature skyline, transforming it into something entirely new. 'When you stand around the table with Lego bricks, you might build on top of what someone else has built, or you might build a new structure together with someone you have never met before,' says Eliasson of that participatory aspect. 'It gradually turns into a hybrid of play and city planning.'

ADDRESS

The High Line
West 30th Street
New York

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If the title of Olafur Eliasson's solo show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton allows for limitless representative and contemplative interpretations, it also begins by fulfilling a basic human desire: to touch the things that arouse our curiosity. 'Contact', his first Paris exhibition since a retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne in 2002, immediately establishes a break with traditional museum protocol by inviting people to feel the craggy surface of a meteorite fragment mounted to a wall.

'Normally, you are not supposed to touch the artwork,' explained the artist, from one of the many irregularly shaped rooms within Frank Gehry’s instantly iconic building, 'but when I touched a meteorite, it was the first time I touched something which was not from this planet.'

For the Dutch-Icelandic artist, the idea of 'touching the untouchable' has informed a series of new projects that place viewers in an immersive orbit where perceptions are challenged in surprisingly simple ways. With 'Parallax Planet', the convex curvature of a spherical window outdoors transforms water spurting from an everyday garden hose into a hypnotic, Mobius-type loop.

The show’s namesake piece, 'Contact', uses an inclined floor, mirrors and a horizontal amber light to create the sensation of peering out into space from the pole of a planet. Often, it becomes difficult to discern where design ends and illusion begins. Yet Eliasson volunteers the secrets behind his special effects; German black sandpaper, for instance, gives the impression of diamond dust on the walls of 'Double Infinity'.

The show, curated by the Fondation's Suzanne Pagé with support from Laurence Bossé, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Claire Staebler, comprises eight works including the rooftop heliostat 'sun tracker' that refracts rays onto a polyhedron sculpture suspended near the museum’s entry.

But let's not forget Eliasson’s site-specific 'Inside the Horizon', the 43 illuminated triangular columns staggered out along the museum’s grotto. Eliasson was adamant that he and Gehry share complementary visions. 'All of my spaces are generally something you can put down to basically two or three geometrical shapes – circle, cone, triangle – unlike Frank’s building, which is all about waves and free forms and unpredictable.'

So then what to make of the concluding piece, 'Big Bang Fountain'; Eliasson’s water experiment captures the split-second between upward pressure and downward gravitational force, illuminated with a strobe light so that a splash becomes a wondrous cosmic phenomenon. Here, he admits, 'we see things that are unseeable, that you cannot see', adding that the water is 'the sculpture in the show that you can never ever make a mathematical form out of.'

Eliasson, who appeared at the preview wearing a limited Louis Vuitton edition of his 'Little Sun' solar-powered lamp (first introduced during his Tate Modern project in 2012 as part of a continuing mission to provide clean, affordable light to communities without electricity) reassured visitors that they need not follow his map detailing the show’s circuit. 'Maybe getting lost is not so bad after all,' he offered, especially if it leads to 'finding yourself again'. A touching sentiment, indeed.

ADDRESS

Fondation Louis Vuitton
8, Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi
Bois de Boulogne
75116 Paris

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Californian art maverick Doug Aitken's 'Station to Station' train is currently hurtling its way across the US, acting as a traveling public art platform for some of the art worlds big hitters. Among contributions from the likes of Thomas Demand, Ed Ruscha and James Turrell is an intriguing piece by Olafur Eliasson: a drawing machine that is turning the concept of a journey into a physical entity.

Eliasson's contraption - named 'Connecting cross country with a line, 2013' - is a purposefully kinetic. Designed to resemble an old-fashioned traveling trunk, the ingenious yet beautifully simple machine opens up to reveal a spring-assisted drawing plate, where an ink-coated obsidian ball roams freely across a round piece of paper, responding to the train's movements. Each bump and lurch of the railcar will express itself on the piece of paper.

'When Doug explained to me about this notion of a cross-country train, I was really interested in taking this highly conceptual idea and making it tangible,' the artist explains. 'I wanted to make a line that connects one side of America to the next.'

The resulting drawings render the topography of the United States while the journey is in progress. 'The machine is very much about how to feel the shape of America. It's like a seismograph that picks up the shape of the country as you drive across it,' says Eliasson. 'The movement of the ball is determined by the movement of the train and the drawings will serve as a record of the physical activity of the journey. It's like a scientific experiment. It's very analog.'

Eliasson's interest in kinetic drawing dates back to his early collaborations with his father, Elias Hjorleifsson. 'My father was a sailor and some of the waves that he described on his journeys were inconceivable to me. So we came up with this way of drawing that followed the rocking of the boat. It becomes very emotional when you are not doing the drawing by hand and are observing it as it happens.'

Aboard Aitken's train, Eliasson has tasked a small team of drawing operators to supervise and manage the machine. 'Some drawings will be short, maybe around five minutes long, and some will be several hours long. There will be some that are very minimal, while others might be very cluttered.' The operators will make new drawings when the train is passing through the mountains, desert, or Cincinnati, for example.
 
Despite the differences between Aitken's highly digitalized style and Eliasson's conceptual one, Eliasson discussed their mutual appreciation for geography. 'We share the same affinity for making highly physical relationships with the land.'

The artworks created by the drawing machine - all made on circular pieces of paper - will be inscribed with the number of the drawing and the place and date of its execution, before being mounted in round black frames, like the wheels of a train, and exhibited at a later date. Nine poems composed by Olafur Eliasson will be printed on the same paper as the drawings and hung together with them 'as stations among the lines'. Here, we give you a glimpse of one of the poems.

Since 1975, outstanding artists from across the globe have collaborated with BMW in its Art Car Collection. Reflecting the cultural development of art, design and technology, the series has seen the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and David Hockney each make a unique artistic statement about the appearance and meaning of cars in their era.

Initially the Art Car concept was developed by auctioneer and racing driver Herve Poulain, and thus the collection was born. In fact, it was his friend and artist Alexander Calder who created the first design, transforming Poulain’s BMW racing car into a work of art, which he later raced at Le Mans.

With such an enthusiastic response from the audience and car fanatics from this first design, BMW established its Art Car Collection. Although initially using racing cars that had participated in the Le Mans 24-hour race, BMW later branched out and included its production cars.

The latest addition to the Art Car Collection comes in the form of Olufar Eliasson’s BMW H2R project. Returning to the series’ racing roots, Eliasson has transformed the hydrogen-powered car, and is currently being exhibited in ‘Your mobile expectations H2R project’ as part of his retrospective show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.