Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark of Icelandic parentage. He attended the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen from 1989 to 1995. He has participated in numerous exhibitions worldwide and his work is represented in public and private collections including the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Deste Foundation, Athens and Tate. His installations regularly feature elements appropriated from nature. By introducing ‘natural’ phenomena, such as water, mist or light, into an un specifically cultivated setting, be it a city street or an art gallery, the artist encourages the viewer to reflect upon their understanding and perception of the physical world that surrounds them.
In The Weather Project representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.
Berndnaut Smilde (b.1978, Groningen, Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. He produces striking images of ‘real’ clouds suspended within empty rooms. Using a fog machine, he carefully adjusts the temperature and humidity to produce clouds just long enough to be photographed.
It usually takes the artist a few days to set up, or “acclimatise” a space, before a photo shoot. There’s a breathtaking second when a cloud hangs together daintily, resembling a floating mixture of white vapor and mist that you might pass near a damp mountaintop, before it begins to break up and look like a stage set again. Though Smilde’s creations are all types of cumulus clouds, the denser ones tend to hang around the longest.
Last year Smilde banned audiences from watching him create his cloud works after receiving an angry letter from a member of the public in Kentucky. “I think she was expecting a spiritual experience,” he says. “A lot of people think a high-tech process is involved. But I work with anything just to create this idea.” His toolbox has been assembled to manipulate levels of smoke, water, wind, convection currents and light.
Smilde is interested in the temporal nature of construction and deconstruction. His works question: inside and outside, temporality, size, the function of materials and architectural elements.
The Van Gogh-Roosegaarde cycle path was opened at Eindhoven on 12 November.
The opening of this unique cycle path marks the start of the Van Gogh 2015 international theme year. The cycle path is inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s work and it combines innovation and design with cultural heritage and tourism. The Van Gogh - Roosegaarde cycle path was constructed by Heijmans from a design by Daan Roosegaarde and forms part of the Van Gogh cycle route in Brabant.
After dark visitors are amazed by a design of light and colour, inspired by the world-famous painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Together with the artist Daan Roosegaarde, Heijmans developed special innovative technology with which the path is illuminated by thousands of twinkling stones. This creates a play on light and poetry.
Brandon Boyd is pleased to present his latest artworks at Rossmut Gallery on Thursday, October 30th, in Rome.
As written by curator Loretta Di Tuccio in the critical text that accompanies the exhibition, in the series of works on paper, wich premiere in Italy, the precise line of Boyd proceeds to search for a correlation between the human identity and the elements that surround it. Alternating the abstract and the reality, his figures emerge from labyrinths where the sign, as in a topographic work, outlines hypothetical landscapes drawing a human geography.
In Boyd’s works the origin is the nature, which is the source generating repeatable and pure forms in that ambiguous and infinite theme that is the identity.
During the Preview, Brandon Boyd will sign copies of his latest book ‘So the echo’ presented for the first time in Italy.
Biography:
Brandon Boyd was born in 1976 in Calabasas, California. In 1991 he began singing and writing song lyrics for what become an internationally recognized rock band, Incubus. The band is currently in the studio with plans to release new music and tour in 2015. In parallel to the music Boyd is interested in art since he was young and has published three books containing works, photographs and texts he has written: "White Fluffy Clouds" 2003, "From the Murks of the Sultry Abyss" 2007, and "So the Echo”, in 2013, when also recorded his second solo album, 'Sons of the Sea". His works have been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions and he has also created several partnerships with various brands like TOMS Shoes and Hurley for which he created a mural at their Space Gallery; some parts of the mural have been exposed at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Monterey (CA) and in Cape Town, South Africa. The first exhibition of his works in Europe took place last March in Zurich at Grafik 14, with book signings also in Paris and London.
A piece of the historic Covent Garden market appears to have broken free of its stone base, with its top half levitating in the air, in the latest installation by London designer Alex Chinneck.
Take My Lightning but Don't Steal My Thunder by Alex Chinneck is a precise replica of a section of the 184-year-old market building in London's Covent Garden that has been made to look as if its upper portion has broken away from its stone base to float in mid air.
Built from a steel frame and filcor, a type of expanded polystyrene, the 12-metre-long structure took 500 hours to shape using digital carving techniques and was painted to replicate the appearance of the existing building on the site.
A four-tonne counterweight enables the suspension of the top half of the fake building.
Take My Lightning but Don't Steal My Thunder will be on display in Covent Garden's East Piazza until 24 October 2014.
Since 1990 Theo Jansen has been occupied creating new form of life.
Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. He makes skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to heat.
Over time, this skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storm and water and eventually he wants to put these animals out in herbs on the beaches, so they will live their own lives
More info at http://www.strandbeest.com/index.php
