PHOTOSTORY: ‘OLAFUR ELIASSON: YOUR FUTURE IS NOW’

Eliasson invites visitors to navigate a series of recent large-scale installations and sculptures that invoke cycles, arcs, and curves to embody movement.

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with BPI and ‘La Caixa’ Foundation present Olafur Eliasson: Y/our future is now, the first solo presentation by the Danish-Icelandic artist in Portugal.

Eliasson is renowned for creating artworks that traverse the boundaries of conventional exhibition spaces – like the museum and gallery – in order to assume an active presence in civic space. In this new exhibition, Eliasson invites visitors to navigate a series of recent large-scale installations and sculptures that invoke cycles, arcs, and curves to embody movement.

“Olafur Eliasson: Y/our future is now” – exhibition, The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, © Filipe Braga

Placed throughout the Serralves Museum atrium, the central gallery of the Siza building, and the surrounding parkland, artworks are inspired by natural phenomena. Works include Yellow forest, 2017, a circular group of birch trees lit by a ring of yellow monofrequency lamps that challenges perceptions of the natural and the artificial; a large pavilion, The curious vortex, 2019, which swirls in the shape of a vortex; and three new sculptures, Human time is movement (winter, spring, summer), 2019, a series of black-and-white stainless-steel spirals that were made especially for the exhibition.

“Vortices, cycles, spirals, and currents make up Y/our future is now – in the driftwood, sculptures, and pavilion outside; and in the floating rings and circular grove of trees with strangely yellow leaves inside. I hope that in your journey through the exhibition you will feel these movements at a visceral level, and sense how their individual trajectories cross and affect each other.” – Olafur Eliasson

Aiming to foster a dialogue between inside and outside, the selection of works play on the strong relationship the Serralves foundation has developed between the built environment – in the form of a building conceived by the Pritzker Award winner Alvaro Siza – and the surrounding garden, which makes significant contributions to raising social awareness of the importance of protecting landscape heritage. The foundation brings together heritage spaces with contemporary cultural events, without undermining their integrity and permanence. In recognition of its unique position, Serralves Park has won important awards, like the Henry Ford Prize for the Preservation of the Environment (1997), and was recently identified in “The Gardener’s Garden” (Phaidon) as one of the world’s 250 most remarkable gardens.

Olafur Eliasson: Y/our future is now is organized by the Serralves Foundation – Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in partnership with Studio Olafur Eliasson, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles, and is curated by Philippe Vergne, Marta Moreira de Almeida, and Filipa Loureiro.

31 July 2019 – 14 June 2020

Serralves Contemporary Art Museum and Serralves Park, Porto, Portugal

Supported by BPI and ‘La Caixa’ Foundation