Paridis Europe

Stalke Out of Space Project #10

Bilboard Project: Copenhagen

Olafur Eliasson, Michael Elmgreen/Henrik Olesen, Lars Bent Petersen

Collaboration BizArt/Copenhagen

Invited artist/Galleri from US and Germany Denmark

1992

Art on the Billboards

BizArt strikes in five major cities

With Copenhagen as the center, an international art project of significant dimensions is being launched today simultaneously in New York, Rome, Madrid, Cologne, and the Danish capital. The dimensions involve precisely 120 billboards, 3.5 x 2.5 meters, featuring art created by 13 painters from the respective five countries.

The artistic billboards, collectively titled Paradise Europe, will be on display until July 27 around Greater Copenhagen at S-train stations, main roads, shopping centers, and other locations.

The initiative for this gigantic art project about Paradise Europe was taken by the Danish exhibition organizers in the group BizArt, who this time have collaborated with five international galleries.

The galleries are:

• Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
• Galleria Paolo Vitolo, Rome
• Galeria la Maquina Española, Madrid
• Gallerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne
• Stalke Out Of Space in Copenhagen

Over the next 10 days, Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, along with the five galleries in Europe and New York, will present and "exhibit" the 120 art billboards on large video installations. At the same time, the public can gather information about Paradise Europe on location. However, the originals are located in Copenhagen and its surrounding area.

BizArt says about its project:

“Paradise Europe confronts, on various levels, a classic hierarchical consciousness with a (post)modern dissolved awareness. The project situates itself in the space between ideal and emptiness, hierarchy and entropy, vision and reality. Paradise Europe consists of relationships with reality.”

The 13 painters from the five countries are very real and include the names:

• Felix Gonzales-Torres, Sean Landers, and Lorna Simpson from New York
• Formento-Sossella, Emilio Fantin, and Tommaso Tozzi from Rome
• Guillermo Paneque and Frederico Guzmán from Madrid
• Alan Belcher and Lothar Hempel from Cologne
• Lars Bent Petersen, Olafur Eliasson, and Elmgreen & Olesen from Copenhagen

The organizers from BizArt say about themselves that they are a group working with “projects in which media and art spaces are staged in an ongoing investigation of art’s communicative possibilities and effects, especially in public spaces.”

 Jens Kerte