Knight on Eliasson

If you receive the daily LAT email, Christopher Knight is free today. If not, here's an excerpt (I have the full version, which more fully describes the show...) Here's a link to some photos of the house in which the Eliasson is installed:

"Olafur Eliasson went to art school in Copenhagen, considers Reykjavik to be home and has his studio in Berlin. He might be a quintessential citizen of New Europe but spiritually he is a Los Angeles artist.

The 10 works in Eliasson's captivating new exhibition in Pasadena employ light, space, color, perceptual events that include transparency and reflection, and an acute consideration of architectural and natural environments as frames for human experience. Robert Irwin, whose revolutionary work has set the highest standard for Light and Space art since the 1960s, is his primogenitor. And the collective precedent will be found in the diverse sculptures and environments made here during the last 40 years by Larry Bell, Maria Nordman, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler and other such artists.

The Pasadena exhibition is a marvel. As always with Eliasson, it reasserts a basic proposition of Light and Space art. Simply put: Our perception and understanding of objects and events are the foundation of reality; things do not exist outside of human consciousness.

Phenomenology, in short, is the wellspring from which this art flows. This year marks the centennial of that movement's breakthrough in the writing of philosopher Edmund Husserl, but Eliasson is not just restating established principles in his art. Instead, he puts them to work."