Prospero | Olafur Eliasson

Space odyssey

By F.N. | PARIS

LAST October saw the opening of the biggest private museum in Paris: the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a monumental contemporary-art museum designed by Frank Gehry and commissioned by Bernard Arnault, the billionaire boss of the world's biggest luxury-goods group, LVMH. Since then the Fondation has welcomed a steady stream of visitors to tour the building, view sketches and maquettes of Mr Gehry's design, and discover a rotating selection of artworks from the Fondation's own collection.

For the next month they can also see the Fondation's first art exhibition: "Contact", a solo show by Olafur Eliasson, a Danish-Icelandic artist whose atmospheric, multisensory installations attempt to take viewers to another time and place. Mr Eliasson achieved international fame over ten years ago when he placed a giant, sun-shaped installation at the far end of Tate Modern's cavernous Turbine Hall. Swarms of visitors basked in its glow, ensuring "The Weather Project" became one of the museum’s most popular commissions.

The Paris show is also immersive. Visitors are taken on a virtual space odyssey and intermittently plunged into darkness. As the artist puts it, “I would like to encourage visitors to think of themselves as if they were asteroids; to feel themselves floating through the space, meeting the artworks, meeting other visitors.”

The exhibition opens with a real meteorite—cold and strangely metallic—that visitors are invited to touch. Then they enter a passage containing a large glass globe filled with water droplets that delivers an upside-down reflection of the scene outside the building.

The show's highlight is the first of two virtual planets (“Map for Unthought Thoughts”, pictured above). It’s a dark room with a large, bird's-nest-like sculpture in the middle that casts a tall, spiky shadow on the wall opposite. As visitors tiptoe across, their own magnified shadows merge with the sculpture's, and their silhouettes become part of the artwork. On reaching the other side of the room, they suddenly see themselves in a mirror, and realise that the seemingly circular space is in fact semi-circular, and that everything is half as wide as previously imagined. The effect is disorienting and stirring, exactly as the artist intended.

The second virtual planet ("Contact", pictured below) offers a similar experience. It is another dark, mirrored room with a sloping floor. A thin sliver of yellow light runs along the wall, like the line of the horizon. Mr Elisasson wants visitors to feel as though they are standing in the middle of an eclipsed sun. The effect is intriguing, but less arresting than that of the first room, simply because it recalls the previous one so closely.

All the same, this is a solid exhibition, spread over half-a-dozen rooms, with which to inaugurate the Fondation. It is widely accessible, unlike so much other contemporary art, and appears to be bringing in audiences of all ages.

The next show at the Fondation is “Keys to a Passion”, which features a promising array of 20th-century masterpieces on loan from museums around the world. Like "Contact", it is just the kind of exhibition that the Vuitton needs to bolster its artistic programme and provide content befitting Mr Gehry's soaring architecture.

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