Olafur Eliasson at MoMA

Olafur Eliasson is having a moment around these parts. In 2006, there was a positive profile in The New Yorker (key fact: the Danish-Icelandic artist was once a break-dancing champion of Scandinavia); this year there’s the lauded Take Your Time exhibition at MoMA, the off-shoot at PS 1, and the fountains forthcoming in the harbor next month.

Take your time, indeed. Eliasson’s installations are trippy and silly and wonderful. They encourage you to lie down and look up; they make art feel fun again. His work explores looking as a form of social networking, and so participation is integral. A strobe light illuminates each drop of water as it falls from the ceiling and into a trough --- part of the fun is watching the faces of the fellow watchers. The ceiling of one room has been covered with a giant, rotating mirror; elsewhere a gallery’s white walls have been replaced by plastic, which illuminates slowly changing blocks of color (first photo). At both MoMA and PS 1, viewers pointed out neat features of each room or work to strangers, heightening the installations’ feel-good aura.

As it happens, we saw Eliasson's Weather Project at the Tate Modern, another incredible, romantic installation, in which Eliasson basically brought the sun into the huge Turbine Hall (second photo). It's nice to see him still bringing warmth into our lives, albeit a little less literally this time.

Photos: thanks and thanks