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“Your Shared Space” is a work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, who is holding a solo show “Is the Sky Part of the Landscape” at PKM Trinity Gallery, Cheongdam-dong, through Nov. 30. / Courtesy of PKM Trinity Gallery |
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Huge color wheels seem to pulsate with shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. The longer you stare at the painting, the more intense the colors become ― almost with an energy of its own.
These are part of the "Colour Experiment" series by internationally renowned Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, who is known for his research with color, light and space.
Eliasson created several new works for his solo show, ``Is the Sky Part of a Landscape," at the PKM Trinity Gallery, Cheongdam-dong, southern Seoul. He has been doing experiments with color for the last two years, and established a studio laboratory for spatial experiments in Berlin, where he is currently based.
Eliasson's artworks provide sensory experiences that engage the viewers with the space not just physically but mentally.
For the Color Experiment series, he worked with a color chemist to try to mix one color for every nanometer in the spectrum of light, or in simple terms, a "rainbow." A nanometer is equivalent to 1 billionth of a meter.
"It was an attempt to see if a color for every visible nanometer can be mixed, to represent a wavelength. We came up with 360 different colors. Each color was individually mixed and represents 1 nanometer," he told reporters at the gallery, Friday.
``Colour experiment no. 7" features 360 colors, but it is hard to distinguish each and every color that the artist was talking about. Instead, the colors seem to intensify or lighten as it bleeds into the next one. Staring at his Color Experiments can become overwhelming at times, as the colors seem to have a life of their own.
The Dane admitted the human eye is not sensitive to each individual color, and can only discern the differences in color between 5 to 10 nanometers. The differences in color are only apparent if one uses a nanospectrum device.
In the light installation "Your Shared Space," Eliasson played with light and color, showing how a color system can become three-dimensional. A circular mirror is placed at an angle on the wall, while six colored spotlights are trained on it, creating colored shadows on the wall.
Eliasson said this plays with the idea of human perception. "Black is the absence of color, while white is the mixture of all the colors. If you put purple with white, then the white becomes more yellow. Yellow is only created in the context, but it is actually not there. We see things by perception rather than what's there," he said.
Taking this one step further is "Complementary Colour Chart," wherein a fog-filled room is lit up only by a red and green lamp at opposite ends. "When someone walks from one end, the movement of the body changes the color of the room. Walking around would change the colors. A person walking one way, and another person walking the other may see different colors. It's a situation where color is created by the presence of a person and movement," Eliasson said.
These works are only the start of what Eliasson sees as a long-term involvement with color research. ``I'm only at the beginning of a long project to make a color system or color theory. I want to create a color system for me. You can also create your own color system. Everyone can have their own color system, instead of a universal one," he said.
The exhibition runs through Nov. 30 at PKM Trinity Gallery, located in the basement of The Trinity Place, Cheongdam-dong. Visit www.pkmgallery.com or call (02) 515-9496.
cathy@koreatimes.co.kr
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yistory@koreatimes.co.kr
