OLAFUR ELIASSON: BAROQUE BAROQUE

Belvedere and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) are pleased to announce their upcoming exhibition with the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. BAROQUE BAROQUE is an ambitious venture that brings together and reconnects some of Eliasson’s most significant works from the holdings of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21) and the Juan & Patricia Vergez collections. The overview of artworks from two decades of Eliasson’s artistic practice will explore the affinities between his work and the extraordinary baroque setting of the Belvedere’s Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy in Vienna. Alongside these works, new site-specific interventions will activate and articulate the historical ensemble, establishing a dialogue between the volubility of the baroque architecture and the modulating perception provided by Eliasson’s artworks.

Eliasson states, “I find it inspiring that the baroque exhibited such confidence in the fluidity of the boundaries between models of reality and, simply, reality. The presentation of my works at the Winter Palace is based on trust in the possibility of constructing reality according to our shared dreams and desires and on faith in the idea that constructions and models are as real as anything.”

Over the last decades, Eliasson has probed the cognitive and cultural aspects of seeing, stressing the relativity of reality. Transcending the confines of art, his heterogeneous, thought-provoking body of work ranges from discreet interventions to large-scale installations and employs diverse frames of reference from the natural sciences, psychology, and philosophy to challenge the normative and internalized ways in which we perceive our surroundings. In works that make use of motion, projections, shadows, and reflections, Eliasson renders visible the elliptical relationships between body, perception, and representation. Ephemeral materials—including light, reflections, water, wave patterns, and air—are brought into conversation with the spaces of the exhibition and with viewers, who become protagonists of the engaging scenarios.

Eliasson plays elegantly with visual illusion, with the liminal and the ephemeral, and with the material and the immaterial, using extroversion and introspection to resonate with cosmological ideas; his works relate strongly to notions of transformation and artifice inherent in the concept of the baroque. As an epoch of great turmoil, the baroque saw revolutionary optical and scientific discoveries as well as a blossoming of interest in the phantasmagoric and the occult. The baroque is here understood as a prolific process of constant reformulation; the tension between light and dark, knowledge and speculation, and rationality and spirituality opens up unexpected, “other” spaces of potentiality and transformation.

The commissioner and original inhabitant of the Winter Palace, Prince Eugene of Savoy, was a visionary with magnificent taste and unrivaled interests in architecture, design, and art that were matched by his passion for the sciences, including mineralogy and astronomy.

The exhibition catalogue is edited by Belvedere and TBA21 and published by Sternberg Press, with essays by Irmgard Emmelhainz, Paul Feigelfeld, Georg Lechner, Sandra Noeth, and Mirjam Schaub.

Roundtable: Creating Worlds
with Olafur Eliasson, Aurélien Barrau, Mirjam Schaub, and Daniela Zyman
Friday, November 20, 5pm, Marble Hall at Upper Belvedere (Prinz Eugen Straße 27, 1030 Vienna)

On the occasion of the opening of OLAFUR ELIASSON: BAROQUE BAROQUE, Belvedere and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary are hosting a roundtable discussion in the lavish Marble Hall of Prince Eugene’s Upper Belvedere. At the event, which will explore different notions of “world-making,” Eliasson, physicist Aurélien Barrau, philosopher Mirjam Schaub, and TBA21 chief curator Daniela Zyman will come together to discuss creativity and knowledge production, as well as the expressive transgressions of reality and illusion that are evident both in the Baroque and in Eliasson’s work.

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Press contacts:
Belvedere
Iris Mickein
: T +43 1 795 57 185 / i.mickein [​at​] belvedere.at / press [​at​] 21erhaus.at

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
Ema Kaiser-Brandstätter:
 T +43 01 513 98 56 55 / ema.kaiser [​at​] tba21.org / press [​at​] tba21.org