Your trust. Olafur Eliasson

The Kunsthalle Mannheim is pleased to present Your trust, a selection of recent works by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. In the exhibition, the encounter between visitor and artwork is in focus. The centrepieces of Your trust are five new glass sculptures, which are being shown in a museum context for the first time. They are complemented by a series of five watercolours, a large-format book made of glass (A View Becomes a Window, 2013) and a floating Navigation star (2011). These works all play with the effects of space and movement on our processes of vision and perception.

The new sculptures Your confidence, Your instinct, Your intuition, Your compassion and Your optimism function like small viewing machines whose effects depend on how the light falls as well as the position and movement of the visitor. They consist of six glass panes placed one behind the other in a metal frame. Each of the discs is a different colour and has a spherical hole ranging from narrow oval to circle. When looking into these layers of colour, shape, and reflection, it becomes clear how much vision is influenced by spatial, material and individual conditions. As so often with Eliasson's artworks, the human experience emerges as both a universal and a deeply individual process.

This selection of works is displayed in two rooms of the Kunsthalle Mannheim's Jugendstil-Building, extending the content and form beyond Olafur Eliasson's Starbrick installation in the rotunda. The new acquisition was unveiled in the autumn of 2013 after the Kunsthalle's major refurbishment, funded in part by the Wilhelm Müller Foundation. It hangs above the rotunda and forms, along with Brancusi's Big fish, the artistic heart of the museum. The light installation consists of 35 star-shaped light modules organised into a honeycomb-like structure. With Starbrick and its positioning in the Kunsthalle, Eliasson is asking fundamental questions: "How does light define space? How does it affect the way we perceive the world? Light opens undefined spaces and challenges us to define our perception anew. It has a special expressiveness; with its transience, it evokes personal feelings and stories that often unfold in a social context."

Since 1995 Eliasson (b. 1967) has been working together with more than 70 colleagues in his Berlin studio on complex questions around our experience of space. Studio Eliasson is a laboratory where specialists from various disciplines—artists, art historians, architects, engineers, scientists—come together to experiment and translate the results of their joint research into artworks that deal with sensory perception. The viewer plays a central role in all of Eliasson's works, be they installations, sculptures, photographs or architectural projects, because it is only through reception that the concepts are fully realised.