Press Release

GALLERY Kirke Sonnerup
Stalke Collection
Invitation - October 4, 2002

Olafur Eliasson

"The View That Never Thinks"

From October 12 to November 30, Galleri Kirke Sonnerup presents an extensive exhibition by the internationally renowned Danish/Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.

The exhibition features exclusively photographic works created between 1993 and 2002.

The title of the exhibition, "The View That Never Thinks," reflects Olafur Eliasson’s approach to landscapes in Icelandic nature. For the audience, the exhibited works will largely be experienced as "open" works, where the viewer's own perception becomes central.

As Eliasson himself expresses:
"I am particularly interested in what constitutes a space. Do we create it through our presence and the way we see it? How are we integrated into it? My works only exist when there is a viewer, and for me, my work is about giving the individual the opportunity to evaluate their own placement and role in relation to others, to objects, and to nature.
What opportunities do we have to see ourselves from the outside? To navigate something as abstract as society, you need tools, and here art can play a role.”
(Politiken, February 17, 2002)

Olafur Eliasson began studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1988 and moved to Cologne in 1993, where he held his first solo exhibition at the gallery Lukas & Hoffmann. Today, he lives in Berlin, where he is affiliated with the prominent gallery Neugerriemschneider.

In 1995, curator Francesco Bonami invited Eliasson, among others, to participate in the exhibition "Campo" in Venice. This exhibition, consisting exclusively of photographic works, marked the beginning of a new generation of prominent international artists.

Next year, Olafur Eliasson will represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale. Additionally, he will hold a solo exhibition at Tate Modern in London, as well as exhibits at the Osaka Museum in Japan and Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, starting November 2, 2002.

Over the past few years, Olafur Eliasson has participated in significant exhibitions at the Guggenheim (NY), the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Art Institute of Chicago, and Kunsthalle Bielefeld.

Many major museums worldwide have acquired Eliasson’s works for their collections. In Denmark, his work has been prominently featured at Esbjerg Kunstmuseum and Vestsjællands Amts Kunstmuseum, both of which have recently acquired pieces by Eliasson.

Galleri Kirke Sonnerup, which is part of the Stalke Galleri in Copenhagen, opened in April this year. Olafur Eliasson’s exhibition is the second in this series. Eliasson grew up in the Holbæk area, and it is also due to his local connection that it is a pleasure for us to present him in our new gallery.

Three years ago, Holbæk acquired a large outdoor pavilion for the municipal beach park, which today is one of the town's prominent landmarks.

Review

LIGHT FALL

Olafur Eliasson. A retrospective exhibition featuring the Icelandic-Danish artist's photographs shows him as a solid neo-romanticist.

As an artist, Olafur Eliasson has followed two independent paths over the past decade. He has worked both with installations and photography.

Regarding the former, his work is especially characterized by an exploration of light. Whether in minimalist gallery works or monumental museum pieces, Eliasson’s focus on light is central. In the realm of photography, he has created series often centered around landscapes, where attention is drawn from the smallest geological phenomena to vast panoramic views of nature. In both areas, the artist delves into poetic interpretations and depictions of natural forms: light, stones, mosses, and especially fire—the fundamental elements that shape existence and our experience of the world.

Olafur Eliasson would hardly use the term "poetic" himself, as it seems distant from his deliberate and articulated artistic strategies. The same goes for "romantic," which he tends to avoid. Instead, he aligns with Nietzsche’s critique of romanticism and religious metaphysics, preferring a philosophy focused on "the things that are." Thus, his work examines metaphysical themes in the light of physicality, akin to artists like James Turrell, though Eliasson’s light is purely "artificial" and "constructed."

This approach is evident in his landscape photography, seemingly devoid of sentimental overtones. His images emphasize places, types, stones, soil, lichen, and water—nothing more than what the viewer perceives and the seeker captures. Yet, a subtle unease lurks in Eliasson’s self-awareness, much like the Danish painter Per Kirkeby, who never depicts nature, landscapes, or romantic grandeur without filtering it through his personal perspective, tinged with pop-art and modernity. This restraint is essential; feelings are refined, concealed, and sublimated—but it’s beautiful to know they’re present in the work

This is also true for Olafur Eliasson.

One strand of his photography is currently on display in a significant exhibition at Galleri Kirke Sonnerup near Roskilde. The gallery, established by the Stalke brothers, Sam Jedig and Kim Bendixen, operates as an "out of space" gallery, a satellite of Galleri Stalke on Vesterbrogade in Copenhagen. The name “Stalke” was inspired by filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's "Stalker." Here, Eliasson’s old collaborator and fellow artist presents a retrospective. While Eliasson has himself become a "stalker" of sorts—a wanderer on the international scene—Galleri Kirke Sonnerup provides Jedig with a permanent place, a home base

The gallery is well-positioned to showcase Eliasson’s photographic works from the last decade. The walls of the 400-square-meter gallery, arranged across multiple floors, are adorned with the artist’s photographic visions.

The artist’s Icelandic roots are unmistakable in these works. Most of the photographs were taken on the island in the north. For example, there is the “Petru, Völven” series from 1994, inspired by an Icelandic woman’s stone collection. Then there is the “Stone Series” from 1994–95, featuring close-up shots of the polished fractures of stones, which nearly transform into abstract forms before the viewer’s eyes.

Also featured are the famous photographs of Eliasson’s younger sister in brightly colored clothing from 1997, set against the backdrop of black, moon-like lava rocks—a striking juxtaposition of childlike innocence against an all-encompassing earthly darkness. Additionally, the “Large Stone Series” from 1997 focuses on ice-shaped lava stones captured from various angles in a visual study of absolute form. Lastly, there is the “Glacier Series” from 1999, consisting of 42 minutely detailed photographs of glaciers.

A recurring and unifying theme in these works is a series of larger photographs of the Icelandic landscape, captured from the ground, from the air, or in compositions featuring barren mountains, cliffs, or river canyons with occasional figures, buildings, greenhouses, or geothermal power stations. These images were taken over the last decade during Eliasson’s annual travels through Iceland’s geography and social topography.

There is an immediate beauty in many of these photographs. Just as the land art of the 1960s and 1970s laid the groundwork for Eliasson’s work, contemporary landscape photography also leaves its mark on him. Yet traces of artistic history and the perception of landscapes can also be found. Without a doubt, Eliasson views Iceland’s landscape with a dual perspective. On one hand, he sees it through the lens of modern art, while on the other, he captures it as a contemporary space, where the modern Iceland is registered and phenomenological objectivity, on the other hand, opens his perspective to a historical approach to the landscape. When Eliasson observes, he also sees the landscape through the eyes of other artists, thereby inscribing himself into the tradition.

THE ARTIST'S close-up studies of lava rocks and stone formations create a universe of undulating modulations and, in their own way, reference Iceland's preeminent landscape painter, Johannes Kjarval. He too delved into the ground and foreground, painting stones and rock formations with a sensory, almost organic, pantheistic feeling for the earth from which we come. Eliasson's photographs, despite their lack of painterly texture, have something of the same character. But the artist's neo-romantic perspective reaches further back, so to speak, to the essence of it. Romanticism's foreground studies, with their prominent foreground figures, recur in his large stone series, where the stone simultaneously blocks spatial perception and supports it by creating depth in the photographs. And in the glacier series, Eliasson ventures deep into the sublime sense of nature, into the elevated, vast, abyssal, and form-creating qualities of nature akin to a pre-romanticist like Caspar Wolf, for instance. Meanwhile, the series of the younger sister is pure H.C. Andersen – childhood encapsulated in darkness, even the way the girl seems to float on the black ground's shimmering lava, testifies to the potential fall; adulthood subject to the strange spirit of self-sacrifice in "The Snow Queen."

Olafur Eliasson reveals nature's fundamental forms in his photographs. But he does not do so unconditionally. He incorporates the entire West Nordic understanding of nature into his images, making us co-observers across all modernity. Thus, we can see directly into the core elements of nature: the water cascading over the cliffs, freezing in the crystals of ice; the stones towering the earth upward; the vegetation, moss, and lichen softening and coloring the world; and finally the light descending from the sky, which in some images can make even mountain masses appear as though they are floating. All this is created with a deeply romantic mindset, regardless of whether the artist acknowledges it or not. And that is enough. The artist and the critic, the work and the viewer, thrive on frictions.

Henrik Wivel

Weekendavisen 18-24.19.2002

New Exhibition Opens in Sonnerup

Opening Tomorrow with Olafur Eliasson

Bramsnæs: Tomorrow, an exhibition opens at Galleri Kirke Sonnerup featuring the gallery owner Sam Jedig's artist friend, the renowned Olafur Eliasson.

• The exhibition exclusively showcases photographic works created by Olafur Eliasson from 1993 to the present day, according to gallery owner Sam Jedig.
  The title of the exhibition is "The View That Never Ends" and reveals the artist’s encounter with the Icelandic landscape. However, these are also open works that viewers can interpret for themselves.

Olafur Eliasson graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 1988 and moved to Germany in 1993, where he is now affiliated with the Neugerriemschneider Gallery in Berlin. In 1995, Olafur Eliasson exhibited photographs in the Campo exhibition in Venice, which became the starting point for a new generation of pioneering photographic artists.

Next year, he will represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale and will also hold solo exhibitions at Tate Modern in London and the Osaka Museum in Japan.

Dagbladet

Stone & Glaciers as Photo Art

Photo Exhibition Opened in Kirke Sonnerup

Bramsnæs: Light brown lava stones, massive glaciers, and white ice fields in Iceland are the main motifs in the photo exhibition by artist Olafur Eliasson, which opened at Galleri Kirke Sonnerup last Saturday.

• "Olafur Eliasson worked together with Per Bak Jensen, who made photo art into an art form of its own," explains gallery owner Sam Jedig while standing in front of the series of photographs by Olafur Eliasson.

It is a collection of images of stones, an exhibition of geological formations—such as a woman seated on a stone—that were created in the southeast of Iceland. These images are now exhibited in the former assembly hall that Sam Jedig has turned into a gallery in his house and garden.

• "Today, the house is set up as a museum, which you can visit. And this series of photographs was one of the first series Olafur Eliasson created. It was in 1993, and the images belong to the West Zealand Museum, which bought the entire series when Iceland became fashionable in Denmark. But even though they are not for sale, Sam Jedig says they are a necessary part of a gallery that offers both psychological and artistic experiences."

Olafur Eliasson grew up in Holbæk but has roots in Iceland, which is also the origin of the motives for this series of works from southeast Iceland.

The exhibition is an interaction between the well-known Icelandic artist and Sam Jedig, who has worked with exhibitions at Galleri Stalke in Copenhagen.

• "He was my assistant for seven years before he entered the Art Academy," Sam Jedig says of the artist, while also introducing another exhibition that Eliasson curated in Japan.

But there is yet another story connected to Eliasson. Olafur was fascinated by Gunnar Örn, who gifted Sam Jedig his first painting when he was 14 years old. And this gift laid the foundation for Jedig’s lifelong engagement in art.