21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

Artwork Data

About the Artwork

In Colour activity house, three curved, glass walls, installed around a central outdoor lamp, form a cyclone-shaped pavilion. The pavilion draws conceptually on the subtractive colour model CMYK, with each wall consisting of glass tinted in one of three primary colours, either cyan, magenta, or yellow. Depending on the viewer’s position within the pavilion as well as his or her degree of movement, the regions of colour created by the walls mix together and produce various hues. The pavilion’s engagements with its surroundings are myriad. From within the folds of the pavilion, visitors look out onto a tinted urban environment, while externally, its glass walls present hued reflections to passers-by – both effects transforming the everyday scenery into a polychromatic cityscape. When the sun sets, the lamp at the centre illuminates the pavilion, turning the artwork into a lighthouse of colours and emphasising the spectrum of tints created by its glass walls.

About the Artist

Olafur ELIASSON

Born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1967. Lives in Berlin, Germany and Copenhagen. Olafur Eliasson has been a frequent invitee to international group exhibitions ever since his participation in the 1995 Venice Biennale. He has also held numerous solo exhibitions at major art museums in Europe and North America. Eliasson’s work is recognized for its capability to undermine the viewer’s routine visual perceptions and awareness, using light, shadow, color, fog, wind, waves, and other phenomena appearing in nature. His highly successful The weather project installed in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London, in 2003, earned him critical acclaim.