Olafur Eliasson at Museo Lázaro Galdiano

From 23 April to 25 July, 2021 the Museo Lázaro Galdiano will host the artist’s book A view becomes a window, created by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson for Ivorypress.

The book is an edition of nine unique books. In lieu of pages, the leather-bound volumes contain a variety of glass sheets of various colours, qualities, and degrees of opacity.

The portrait-format books are best perused opened upon a bookrest. Reminiscent of an atlas in size, they are literally full of illuminations: light is reflected, refracted, and conducted by the glass pages. When the pages are turned, the layers of coloured glass create complex reflections, so that the viewer becomes the protagonist of the book’s playful mirror narrative. The experience is heightened by the use of colour-effect filter glass for the first and last pages. With a solid background behind these pages, they act like mirrors, but when light shines through them, they appear translucent and create a dichromatic effect, reflecting light in the complementary colour to that of the glass.

Cut directly into some of the glass plates, ellipses and circles frame the lector’s face as she turns the pages. In the multi-layered reflections, she witnesses her likeness slip across the vitreous surfaces, fade, and jump out in crystalline clarity.

This exhibition is part of a multi-institutional exhibitions program that will take place in museums and libraries across Europe and the United States during 2021 on the occasion of Ivorypress’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Each exhibition engages with the medium of the artist’s book by placing it in dialogue with the collection of the host institution and venue, seeking to highlight the artist’s book as an artistic medium alongside other media such as drawing, painting, and sculpture.