Olafur Eliasson

In connection with the opening of Olafur Eliasson's work Your rainbow panorama, which will mark the city of Aarhus as a focal point for international contemporary art, ARoS is presenting a number of Eliasson's installations in the exhibition gallery on level 6. These include Beauty (1993), The inverted panorama house (2004) and Your atmospheric colour atlas (2009), all of which in different ways revolve around the appearance of colours to the human eye.

In connection with the opening of Olafur Eliasson's work Your rainbow panorama, which will mark the city of Aarhus as a focal point for international contemporary art, ARoS is presenting a number of Eliasson's installations in the exhibition gallery on level 6.

These include Beauty (1993), The inverted panorama house (2004) and Your atmospheric colour atlas (2009), all of which in different ways revolve around the appearance of colours to the human eye.

When encountering Eliasson's art, the viewer takes centre stage. Our sensory experiences of the world and the cultural templates that help shape our understanding of the world around us are constantly brought into play.

Eliasson's practice is characterised by his constant investigation of human interaction with the world around us. In the borderland between science and aesthetics, rational contemplation and sensory experiences, culture and nature, Eliasson's art makes us aware of the ways in which we physically and mentally orientate ourselves in our surroundings.

In the installation The inverted panorama house (2004), we can experience the changing shadows and colours reflected on the surrounding screen from both inside and outside as five rotating coloured glass discs and a powerful light projector meet.

Natural elements such as light, air and water often feature in Eliasson's works, and in Beauty (1993), the colours of the rainbow are recreated in the constellation of light and dust jets of water.

Your atmospheric colour atlas (2009) consists of fog illuminated from above in the colours red, green and blue. As you move around the installation in the border areas between the different colour zones, the colours mix to form magenta, cyan and yellow. Where all the colours meet, an area of pure white light is created. The colourful fog blurs our vision and challenges our sense of orientation, forcing us to navigate the space using our other senses and perhaps create our own colour atlas.