Olafur Eliasson

Upon passing through the heavy, clear plastic curtains—like the kind used to enclose walk-in refrigerators—at the entrance to Olafur Eliasson’s latest exhibition, one encounters a wondrously strange update of a desolate Romantic landscape. With disarming simplicity, Eliasson lets nature take over the gallery space, turning the exhibition into the frozen image of a remote glacial era. Eight enormous, utterly blue ice blocks—their purity only sporadically spotted with traces of dirt that hint at their natural origin—fill the space and give off a little bit of steam. Placed on a light blue floor, which echoes the intense color of the thick ice, these chunks are kept at a constant temperature of -5°C (23° F). The six-ton blocks, formed about fifteen thousand years ago, were brought into the gallery from a glacier on the south coast of Iceland. The high-tech solution to the problem of transporting them elides the complexity of the dislocation, resulting in a seemingly simple visual image—eight fragments of the sublime. Titled “your waste of time,” 2006, this exhibition hints at the power of nature and, in its apparent permanence, highlights the tenuousness of the habitat from which it was removed and the brevity of human life.