Red Brick Collection: Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Mühe, Christopher Le Brun

On November 5，Red Brick Art Museum will present an exhibition of selected works from its collections that featuring three internationally renowned artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Mühe and Christopher Le Brun，covering installations, oil painting，photograph and other forms. The show will present several extraordinary scenes of contemporary art in large scale.

Olafur Eliasson

Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967. He works with sculpture, painting, photography, film, installation, and digital media. His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self and community. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the public through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy- making, and climate action.

Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows have appeared in major museums around the globe. He represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project, an enormous artificial sun shrouded by mist, in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, which was seen by more than two million people. In 2014, Contactwas the opening exhibition of Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Verklighetsmaskiner (Reality machines), at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 2015, became the museum’s most visited show by a living artist. In 2016, Eliasson created a series of interventions for the palace and gardens of Versailles and mounted two large-scale exhibitions: Nothingness is not nothing at all, at Long Museum, Shanghai, and The parliament of possibilities, at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul. Eliasson’s site-specific installation Reality projector opened at the Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, in March 2018, the same month as The unspeakable openness of things, his solo exhibition at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing. In 2019, In real life, a wide-ranging survey exhibition of Eliasson’s artistic practice over the past twenty-five years, opened at Tate Modern, in London, before travelling to Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020.Olafur Eliasson: Symbiotic seeing opened at Kunsthaus Zürich in January 2020, and Sometimes the river is the bridge was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from April to September 2020. For the exhibition Life, in 2021, Eliasson removed the glass facade of the Fondation Beyeler, in Basel, Switzerland, and conducted the bright green waters of the existing pond into the museum’s galleries, along with a host of aquatic plants and the odd duck or spider.

Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians.

Andreas Mühe

Andreas Mühe was born in 1979 in Karl-Marx-Stadt, Germany, and lives and works in Berlin.

Recent solo exhibitions include Stories of Conflict at Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2022); Alles, was noch nicht gewesen ist, ist Zukunft, wenn es nicht gerade jetzt ist. Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Germany (2021); Mischpoche, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany (2019); PATHOS ALS DISTANZ at Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2017). In 2018, Mühe was presented in the Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing and the G2 Kunsthalle Leipzig with solo exhibitions.

The artist has received numerous photographic awards and his works are represented in numerous collections, including the Musée National d’histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, Luxembourg; Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany; DZ Bank Collection, Germany; Foundation F.C. Gundlach, Germany; Cultural Foundation Montblanc, Germany; Wemhöner Collection, Germany; Schloss Kummerow, Germany.

All the featured works of Andreas Mühe infuse with an aesthetic sensibility for the scenic world of the theatre and presentation, these works weave a narrative of the artist’s native country, examining its unique history, the impact of the division of Germany, the subsequent process of re-unification and the present. As a ten-year-old boy, Andreas Mühe witnessed the fall of the Wall in 1989, from which time German history has become his life’s theme. The exploration of atmospheres and ambience, and his encounters with leading personalities and contemporary history are expressed visually in hyperbolic form in his powerful evocative images. Mühe declares “whoever controls images controls reality”. Along with determining what is, and ought to apply, power lies at the very centre of what it’s all about. His photographs raise confusion and questions in respect of hierarchies, authority and traditional concepts, and it shows a subtle yet disturbing moral portrait of what, in the broadest sense, can be called ‘German’.

Christopher Le Brun

Sir Christopher Mark Le Brun is a painter, printmaker and sculptor. Born in Portsmouth in 1951 he trained at the Slade and Chelsea Schools of Art, London. Le Brun has served as a trustee of major British art institutions: Tate, National Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Royal Drawing School and the National Portrait Gallery. Elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1996, he became the inaugural Professor of Drawing in 2000. Subsequently elected President from 2011-2019, he oversaw the most significant redevelopment in the Academy’s 250-year history and is widely acknowledged as having revitalised the Academy’s reputation.

Le Brun was awarded a Knighthood in the 2021 New Year Honours List for services to art.

His work is characterised by an adherence to the essential values of touch, light, space and colour while maintaining a questioning and strongly individual stance in relation to contemporary art history. His art is rooted in the long tradition of the English appreciation of landscape and nature – whether expressed in painting, poetry or music – which provide a common ground frequently referred to throughout his work.

His work can be found in museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Tate, the V&A and the British Museum, London; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.