OLAFUR ELIASSON AT THE NEUES MUSEUM

From 23 September 2021 to January 16th 2022, the Neues Museum will host the artist’s book A View Becomes a Window, created by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson for Ivorypress in the Library of Antiquities.

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 taking place in museums and libraries across Europe and the United States during 2021 and 2022 on the occasion of Ivorypress’ twenty-fifth anniversary.  As part of the celebration, Ivorypress is publishing moreover a three-volume book that chronicles the history of Ivorypress since 1996, using a variety of primary sources that range from oral histories and archival documents to pictorial records and texts.