Baroque Baroque

Conceived by Francesca von Habsburg in collaboration with Agnes Husslein, “Olafur Eliasson: Baroque Baroque” brings together and reconnects some of Eliasson’s most distinguished works from the holdings of TBA21 and the Juan and Patricia Vergez Collection.

While emphasizing the way spaces are constructed by history and tradition, Eliasson’s works address the viewer in her embodied experience. Through the use of projections, shadows, and reflections, the artworks foreground the relationship between body, perception, and image. They anchor agency in the body and mind in motion as they invite the viewer’s active engagement by mirroring, fragmenting, and inverting her position within space.

Eliasson says “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.”

In the entrance Vestibule, the light installation Die organische und kristalline Beschreibung (1996) floods the walls, floor, and ceiling with swelling washes of blue and yellow light, an ocean of color that loosens the viewer’s sense of the stability of her environment. In Yellow corridor (1997), monofrequency light is used to heighten the precariousness of our relationship to visible space.

Eliasson’s optical machines and installations – such as Kaleidoscope (2001), New Berlin Sphere (2009), Your welcome reflected (2003), and Seu planeta compartilhado (“Your shared planet”), (2011) – reflect the artist’s ongoing investigations of color, perception, transformation, and deconstruction, an inquiry that is particularly interesting in relation to the baroque context. A site-specific intervention in the form of a continuous mirror traversing the enfilade of grand rooms further disorients the viewer by folding and re-folding the complex spaces it produces. Wishes versus wonders (2015), a steel half-ring mounted to the mirror wall in the Hall of Battle Paintings, stages an encounter between reality, illusion, and the elaborate artifice of the surroundings, simultaneously multiplying lines of potentiality.

Within this terrain of doubling and paradox, Eliasson calls into question our received habits of seeing and experiencing space. His artworks make us wonder and reconsider, giving meaning to the enigmatic doubling inherent in “Baroque Baroque”.

November 21, 2015 – March 6, 2016
opening Friday, November 20, 7 pm
Olafur Eliasson
Baroque Baroque
with works from Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna and Juan & Patricia Vergez private collections, Buenos Aires
conceived by Francesca von Habsburg
in collaboration with Agnes Husslein
curated by Daniela Zyman & Mario Codognato
Belvedere Museum
The Winter Palace of Prince Eugene of Savoy
Himmelpfortgasse 8, Vienna