Color, light and geometry collide in the ethereal work of Icelandic-Danish artist, Olafur Eliasson. For nearly 30 years, Eliasson has explored the limits of perception through playful artworks that invite his audiences to reflect on our relationships with each other and the natural world. Like his iconic Tate Modern installation, Eliasson’s latest interventions react to the cavernous halls of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary, his first museum solo exhibition in Los Angeles.
Produced in collaboration with Getty’s larger science-focused PST ART initiative, OPEN presents a series of large-scale optical devices that respond to onlookers, providing dazzling sensorial experiences that address concepts of embodiment, perception and participation.
The exhibition opens with Eliasson’s Kaleidoscopic Towers, inviting visitors to gaze under several massive structures that contain a constellation of mirrors, shifting with one’s movements and the time of day. The optical illusions continue in the next room, showcasing Your Changing Atmosphere and Kaleidoscopes of Uncertainty, a smaller rhombic triacontahedron and triangular device that expand on light and shape.
A standout on view, and one devoid of the audience’s participation, is Weather-Drawing Observatory for the Future, an autonomous drawing machine that endlessly creats radial compositions daily. The instrument is inspired by real meteorological data, such as temperature and solar radiation, drawing attention to the climate emergency. “People still tend to think that museums are only presenting the art,” Eliasson previously told BOMB, “but in fact the ideology of display touches directly upon questions of responsibility: How do you organize history for people? How do you show the art of the last hundred years? Will the presentation be monographic or thematic?”
Acutely aware of the ways in which art is traditionally presented, Architectural Light Play subverts the way onlookers interact with an exhibition room, as Eliasson utilizes various lighting effects that encourage the audience to attune to their sense in unconventional ways.
Dive into Eliasson’s kaleidoscopic vision, as OPEN exhibits at MOCA LA until July 6, 2025.
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N Central Ave,
Los Angeles, CA 90012
