MADRID.- Galería Elvira González presents Your immeasurable expanse of flares, Olafur Eliasson’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, bringing together 19 paintings and 2 light installations. The exhibition opened to the public on Wednesday, February 25.
In his ongoing investigation into light, color, perception, and various optical phenomena, Eliasson explores the relationship between chance, matter, and sensory experience. The works presented in this exhibition span different lines of inquiry, yet all share the common denominator of the experimental process that takes on a central role.
Some of the paintings in the show such as Seven days of sunlight (Monday–Sunday) (2026), The self-led energy nebula (2026) or Dark lichen for brighter days (2026) are created by pouring highly diluted inks mixed with isopropyl alcohol onto unprimed circular canvases. The pigment slowly expands outward, forming vibrant halos.
“In the circular paintings, intention and accident coexist — a tension between natural forces and the controlling power exerted by the act of creation.” As Eliasson notes, a subtle intervention through heat and directed air currents guides or restrains the movement of the paint. The resulting composition emerges from the convergence of chance, the material’s viscosity, the qualities of the support, and the atmospheric conditions of the moment.
The exhibition also includes works such as Transformative self-led colours (2026). This installation consists of fifteen works made from a single block of watercolor paper, where each sheet absorbs the excess ink from the previous one, generating an organic sequence of interconnected compositions. In this piece, a translucent blue blown-glass panel with a large circular opening acts as a passe-partout, emphasizing the central explosion of color.
Another key focus of the exhibition is the “flares” series, inspired by the optical phenomenon of lens flare—those rings and circles of light that appear when a camera is pointed toward an intense light source. Eliasson understands these phenomena as “mysterious accidents,” which, although traditionally considered errors in photography, he transforms into the main subject of the composition.
In works such as The attention flare (2026), through the use of circular stencils and the pouring of ink and black paint, the artist creates undulating dark fields that reveal the luminous contrast of ellipses and chromatic circles, evoking the illusion of light in space. These deep black backgrounds, in Eliasson’s words, “could be understood as voids,” achieving “an apparently indeterminable depth”.
Within this series, some works such as The rare flare (2025) and The subconscious flare (2025) display the reverse side of the painted surfaces, presenting paler, more spectral images. In these pieces, the black pigment has not fully penetrated the paper, simulating a kind of afterimage that echoes the “positive” works.
Positioned along the exhibition route and as a spatial counterpoint we find Fireflybiosphere twilighting (2022) a suspended sculpture from a series of sixteen polyhedra developed after decades of research in the artist’s studio.
The work is composed of three concentric polyhedra: two internal structures that interlace and rotate via a motor, LED lights that illuminate the core, and a segmented bubble made of twelve rhombi with eight visible faces that encloses all the elements. The sphere combines blown glass with chromatic-effect filters that reflect a single wavelength while allowing others to pass through, multiplying the projections of the elements and intervening throughout the surrounding space.
With Your immeasurable expanse of flares, Olafur Eliasson proposes an immersive experience in which painting and light enter into dialogue, inviting viewers to become aware of the physical processes that construct the visible and to reconsider the role of chance and accidental transformation in the formation of visible reality.
Artist Statement | Olafur Eliasson
An immeasurable expanse of flares
The works on display at Galería Elvira González contend with things that we cannot see or that we have sometimes found ways to ignore or unsee. These things – like gravity, heat, light, and wind – could be overlooked as background noise, but when they are considered in isolation, they hold significance.
Several of the new works take their compositions from the mysterious accidents that are lens flares. These visual phenomena have inspired many of my works in the last ten years. Lenses can distort and break light into surprising patterns of polygons and colours – beautiful and strange shapes that are often seen as errors in photography, film, and scientific optics. The deep black backgrounds surrounding the flares could be seen as voids. To me, they open up a seemingly indeterminable depth, a space without a fixed central perspective.
In all the works on view, chance played a key role in their creation. As a collaborator, I offered my support as an artistic guide but let the unpredictable take place. Hovering somewhere between intention and accident, the circular paintings attempt to not lose control in today’s world, while also leaving the act of making up to natural forces.
The ink that I used for the paintings is drawn through the porous surfaces in a meeting up of two materials. The colour is carried by gravity and, in reaction to the texture of the paper or canvas, is absorbed according to the capillary effect – the physical phenomenon that explains why wine, dipped in the corner of a tablecloth, travels upwards across the table. Is what you see an image that has been pulled through the canvas to the other side, or is it printed onto the paper, leaving traces of something dispersed through gravity? Other elements have shaped the works as well – including the temperature and humidity of the room and, importantly, the wind, as all the works were painted in a space with a significant draught.
The paintings with vibrant tones are cross sections of a beam of sunlight viewed under a microscope or within a large, circular Petri dish. Others are like the twilight, the hazy emergence of an idea.
