In 1970, the
Austrian artist and architect Max Peintner imagined a small forest contained
within a stadium in a drawing titled The
Unending Attraction of Nature. In it, a sprawling, smoky, industrial city
has subsumed the natural world, and thousands of spectators pack the stadium to
look at a few hundred trees.
At the Winter Palace in Vienna, a selection of works by Ólafur Elíasson forms a site-specific exhibition titled Baroque Baroque. More than a dozen works, created during the last twenty years, are installed within the architecture of the 18th century palace. The contrast of Elíasson’s contemporary works inside grand Baroque staterooms alters perceptions of space and history for an experience that supersedes both.