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JW Turner

The fabulous JW Turner exhibit that includes reinterpretations by Olafur Eliasson

Inspire

The Tate is inviting us to see the last 15 years of creation of one of the greatest painters of all time.

Tate Britain is exhibiting the body of work which comprises the last creative period of William Turner, the great English prodigy who changed the world with his vision of art. “The EY Exhibition: Late Turner Painting Set Free” is the name given to this fortunate encounter with the work of one of the most profound and admirable painters of the 19th century.

The opportunity to appreciate the last 15 years in which Turner created his pictorial visions excites all the lovers of his stunning and intense pieces that blossomed from his hand during this phase. As a complement, they are exhibiting some of his masterpieces, thus bringing us closer to the complete specter of his work. The display indicates Turner’s transformative nature and his constant reinvention through technique and the collected materials in his intense creative processes.

It features watercolors, oils, drawings and prints which show his hand’s experimental and fluent nature. Turner’s studies were centered on understanding and capturing the physical phenomena that intrigued him. Armed with his impeccable understanding of color, his drawing skills and a notable sensitivity to compose, he portrays the speed, the power of the sea and the behavior of the elements that star in his canvasses. His corpus places him as one of the creators that defined the direction of 20th century art.

After William Turner, and to honor this colossal painter, Danish artist Olafur Eliasson gains inspiration through the color theories that influenced the English creator’s technique and search. Eliasson’s work is characterized by bringing to the audience the most moving experiences that have been seen in contemporary art. He has bathed in light some of the most renowned galleries in the world, and he has made every exhibition space a lab of physics applied to art. In the frame of the “EY Exhibition”, the artist presents Turner Colour Experiments, a series in which he takes seven of Turner’s paintings and uses them to explore the painter’s passion for light, color and shadow.

Eliasson abstracts the spectrums in Turner’s paintings and transforms them into dynamic color studies which present the oils in a different manner: in their essence, Turner’s passions summed up in a chromatic abstraction. In the artist’s words:

In the Turner Colour Experiments, I’ve isolated light and colour in Turner’s works in order to extract his sense of ephemera from the objects of desire that his paintings have become. The schematic arrays of colours on round canvases generate a feeling of endlessness and allow the viewer to take in the artwork in a decentralised, meandering way.

This creator’s ambitions allow us to appreciate Turner’s work from a different and extensive angle.

[Olafur Eliasson: Turner colour experiments opened in August and will remain until January 25th 2015.]

[The EY Exhibition: Late Turner – Painting Set Free opened in September and will remain open until January, 2015.]

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