Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor have been commissioned by the Israel Museum to create two new monumental installations on the Museum’s campus, as it nears completion of a comprehensive renewal and expansion, together with a complete reinstallation of all of its collection galleries. These site-specific works will be installed as focal points within the Museum’s newly re-organized campus, opening to the public on July 26, 2010.
These commissions include:
Olafur Eliasson’s installation “Whenever the Rainbow Appears”, consisting of 300 individual paintings that represent in paint on canvas the progression of colors in the spectrum of light visible to the human eye. Measuring a total of 15 x 2.4 meters (or nearly 50 x 8 feet), the work reads from afar as an extended continuum of color. It will be installed at the end of the Museum’s newly designed “Route of Passage”, an enclosed walkway bridging the Museum entrance with a newly centralized Gallery Entrance Pavilion at the heart of the campus.
Anish Kapoor’s site-specific sculpture of polished stainless steel that takes the shape of a 5-meter-tall (15-foot) hourglass. Anchoring the Museum’s outdoor Crown Plaza, at the highest point on its 20-acre campus, this monumental work responds to the duality of Jerusalem, inverting reflections on its curved and mirrored surface of Jerusalem’s sky and of the Museum’s built landscape.
