Colour activity house
Olafur Eliasson (born 1967) · 2010
On the grass outside the museum stands a small pavilion made of three curved walls of coloured glass, one cyan, one magenta, one yellow, arranged in a spiral around a single white lamp on a post. There is no roof and no door. You walk into the spiral, and as the walls overlap the colours mix: cyan through yellow gives green, magenta through cyan gives blue, all three together a smoky grey. The city, the museum and the people passing outside are all tinted as you move, and from outside the pavilion the people inside appear washed in colour too.
Olafur Eliasson, born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents, is best known for the giant artificial sun he installed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2003. His work is about perception, about how we notice light, weather and colour and how that noticing is itself the artwork. Here he uses the three subtractive primaries of printing, cyan, magenta and yellow, rather than the red, blue and yellow of the paint box. Stand still and look at one wall alone, then step so that two overlap, and see how the mixed colour is darker rather than brighter, which is what happens when filters combine. After dark the lamp in the middle switches on and the pavilion glows from within like a small lighthouse of colours.
The work was added in 2010, six years after the museum opened, and it fits the building perfectly: a circle within the great glass circle, transparent, playful, and free to everyone who crosses the lawn. Children treat it as a maze and adults as a photograph. The title suggests a house for the activity of colour, a place where colour does things rather than simply exists. Visit twice if you can, once in daylight and once at night, because the pavilion is two different works.
Did You Know? The three colours are the printer's primaries, cyan, magenta and yellow, so the pavilion mixes light the way an inkjet mixes ink.
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