Word: eliasson
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...with all kinds of life experience on their résumés. Sometimes it's even pertinent. It makes perfect sense that Andy Warhol started out as an advertising illustrator. Or that the welded-steel sculptor David Smith spent time on an auto assembly line. With the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, it's not so easy at first to connect what he does now-create works that invite you to play with fields of colored light or with lenses and mirrors or with your own understandings of how you see-with what he did as a teenager. What I'm talking...
...1980s Eliasson and two friends formed a break-dance crew and spent four years playing Danish clubs (in silver spandex costumes whipped up by his mother). Eventually they won a Scandinavian break-dancing championship. "I was always dancing," he says. "Four or five hours a day, with a mirror in front of me. It gave me a great sense of what the body could do in space, how you could gain control of your body." He pauses. "Also, it was very cool...
Maybe it's not so hard to connect Eliasson at 17-contorting his reflection into a kinetic art object-with Eliasson at 40, producing works that require you to jump in and take part in them, to see but also to do. That's the secret of one of the most captivating pieces in the big Eliasson retrospective, organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn, now at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Beauty consists of a curtain of mist penetrated by a spotlight to produce a floating rainbow wall. The beckoning illusion looks slightly different to each viewer depending...
...Instead, Eliasson's Eye See You, a lamp shaped like the pupil of an eye, will stare out of Vuitton windows and create what the artist calls "a stage like setting on the street." The proceeds from sales of a limited number of the works along with Eliasson's fees for the project will be donated to 121Ethiopia, a charitable foundation established by the artist and his wife, Marianne Krogh Jensen, in Ethiopia...
...show people that even small things can make a change," said Eliasson, who has adopted two children from Ethiopia. The first project for the foundation is rebuilding an orphanage...