As dazzling as the midnight sun – a sight doubtlessly familiar to Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson – is his new exhibition OPEN. The exhibition fills the MOCA Geffen with light and color in an astonishing series of works by a powerful and deeply compelling artist. As a part of the Getty’s PST ART programming, it’s a dynamic one, and my favorite body of work within it. OPEN is the first solo mueseum show by Eliasson in the greater LA area.
Merging light with color, the precision of the geometric form with child-like wonder, Eliasson continues and expands upon his own explorations, here involving parts of the museum’s own architecture.
The main gallery is home to towering kaleidoscopes beneath observation structures that point both skyward and to the MOCA Geffen building itself. While some show the effects of light and mirrors, others offer looks into the sky or roof top.
Some offer fascinating, even surreal hexagons and interconnecting, jungle-gym-like lattices that seems as if they came from another world; another is a simple rainbow. Images shift with time of day and weather, creating marvelous illusions of color, shadow, light – and pure joy, in both the artistry and the wonder of the exhibition.
In another gallery space, colorful jeweled rings and painted works represent the color spectrum along the gallery walls.
In the center of the space, triangular shaped kaleidoscopes point not outward but inward, forming shifting geometric color shapes that resemble flowers or buildings. In the same gallery a large geometric prism hangs, a sculpted version of light and shape made manifest.
Elsewhere on the museum’s cavernous ground floor, an interactive room invites viewers to become colorful shadow participants in light and color magic; upstairs a series of mirrors and large half rings create riveting optical illusions as if one is standing inside a ring within a ring.
The artist and the museum encourage viewers to borrow a pillow from the information desk and recline or sit beneath the main gallery’s large structures to contemplate and view the magical shifts of light and form. Yes, it is all smoke and mirrors – no real smoke, just that of the imagination – and it is an incredible illusion, one that will entrance, enthrall, and change how you view the world. It’s the vision of magicians and angels, and the viewer is the better for having seen it.
As the artist himself posits:
“AM I OPEN/ To facing my numbness?/ To receiving a No?
To explore where I place my attention?/To wonder?/To vulnerability?
To explore where I place my attention? To wonder?/To vulnerability?
Step into this exhibition and invite yourself to find out.
Olafur Eliasson: OPEN is organized by José Luis Blondet, Senior Curator, and Rebecca Lowery, Associate Curator, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo, Curatorial Assistant, and Anastasia Kahn, former Curatorial Assistant, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
The exhibition runs through July 6, 2025 – OPEN up your eyes to it this year. MOCA Geffen is located at 152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles in Little Tokyo.
- Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis
Can’t wait to seeit now! 👌😎✨