Marciano Art Foundation Presents Olafur Eliasson, Albert Oehlen & Peppi Bottrop

Photos by Karen Ostlund
Marciano Art Foundation has invited German artist Olafur Eliasson to develop a new work for the foundation’s spectacular Theater Gallery, on display today until August 25 2018.

Artist Olafur Eliasson Neon Installation titled Reality Projector at first floor

Marciano Art Foundation is excited to present its second artist project, a site-specific installation created for the foundation’s expansive first floor Theater Gallery. The foundation has invited renowned artist Olafur Eliasson for his first major exhibition in Los Angeles, in over a decade. Eliasson’s art includes sculptures, paintings, photography, film, and installations—is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self.
Maurice Marciano said, “I am thrilled to welcome Olafur into the Maricano Art Foundation family. I can’t wait to see his transformation of the theater gallery come to fruition and be able to share this unique and immersive art viewing experience with the Los Angeles community as well as with art lovers from around the world”.
For his exhibition at the foundation, titled Reality projector (2018), Eliasson shows a complex installation that uses projected light and the architecture of the space to create a dynamic shadow play. The artwork references the space’s former function as a theater as well as the history of filmmaking in the city by turning the entire space into an abstract, three-dimensional film.

Eliasson collaborated with musician and sound artist Jónsi to create a unique soundtrack toaccompany the piece. Eliasson recorded his own experimentation on a piano set up in the studio which he played with found objects. The resulting sound library was mixed and arranged by Jónsi, in dialogue with Eliasson into an ambient soundscape to accompany the artwork Reality projector.

The exhibition includes two additional new works, Reality mosaic and Yellow atmosphere projector (both 2018), which Eliasson produced specifically for the Foundation’s lobby.
Olafur Eliasson:
Olafur Eliasson, born 1967, grew up in Iceland and Denmark. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today encompasses some ninety craftsmen, specialized technicians, architects, archivists, administrators, programmers, art historians, and cooks.

Since the mid-1990s, Eliasson has realized numerous major exhibitions and projects around the world. In 2003, Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale and later that year, he installed The weather project in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, London. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, a survey exhibition organized by SFMOMA in 2007, travelled until 2010 to various venues, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Eliasson’s projects in public space include The New York City Waterfalls, 2008.

Albert Oehlen and Peppi Bottrop: Line Packers"" at the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, California. 
On view through June 2018.

The Marciano Art Foundation presented March 1st "Line Packers”," a special exhibition, conceived by Cornelius Tittel, of two German painters Peppi Bottrop (b. 1986, Bottrop) and Albert Oehlen (b. 1954, Krefeld). The foundation’s Lounge Gallery will feature Bottrop’s line-drawing paintings responding to the architecture of the Lounge Gallery itself alongside works from Oehlen’s Computer Paintings, a series that the artist began in the early 1990s, which is now regarded as a turning point for contemporary painting.

Bottrop’s work is conceived as a meditation on his hometown, a once prominent coal mining and rail center in the Ruhr region. Bottrop employs charcoal—a metaphor for what once powered the world, and a nod to the now-defunct mechanical industry—in an expansive wall-drawing engraved into slabs of Fermacell, a material now replacing sheetrock or gypsum used in the construction of institutional architecture.

Oehlen’s Computer Paintings, which will be affixed to Bottrop’s walls, made between 1992 and 2008, exemplify Oehlen’s pioneering role as one of the first contemporary painters to explore the nascent capabilities and limits of drawing and line-making through the use of a now-rudimentary Texas Instruments computer. The wall-drawings and supports by Bottrop juxtaposed with Oehlen’s Computer Paintings suggest new possibilities for the line in painting. This line, embedded materially into the Fermacell walls, offers a proposition for the medium of painting to re-define itself. The two autonomous, yet mutually-dependent works establish a place of intensive communication and self-exploration, supporting one another in this single, temporary unification that looks to Wilshire Boulrbstf and Los Angeles, a city that is just as easily defined by its own lines of interstate and highway infrastructure.

Karen Ostlund infront of Albert Oehlen and Peppi Bottrop: Line Packers"

 Admission to all exhibitions and programs at MAF is FREE. Hours: Thursday and Friday 11AM–5PM and Saturday 10AM–6PM and Sunday11AM–5PM. Closed Monday Tuesday and national holidays. Open for school groups on Wednesdays by appointment. Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. Visit https://marcianoartfoundation.org

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