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INTERPIPE STEEL Mill Presents Dnepropetrovsk sunrise and Four Other Unique Artworks by Olafur Eliasson

october 8, 2012

The central work Dnepropetrovsk sunrise is a 60-metre-tall artificial sun, specifically conceived for the factory workers and the city of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine

The INTERPIPE STEEL Mill is pleased to present Dnepropetrovsk sunrise alongsidefour other new site-specific works by internationally acclaimed artist Olafur Eliasson, commissioned for the steel mill in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.

With 700 million USD invested by its founder Victor Pinchuk, the electric steel-melting INTERPIPE STEEL Mill is the first large-scale industrial plant to be built from scratch since Ukraine became independent in 1991. A signature project for Ukrainian society, it unites green state-of-the-art technology with five large-scale permanent masterpieces by Eliasson that are integral to the new factory.

Olafur Eliasson: “Art has the capacity to suggest visions, states of uncertainty, and new stimuli, whereas factories, to ensure smooth production, are of necessity governed primarily by order and predictability. I saw this commission as an invitation to co-develop a generous and welcoming environment; a setting where human values and needs come first, where a degree of unpredictability and aesthetic experience is embraced in the factory’s everyday life and in the city of Dnepropetrovsk”.

Victor Pinchuk: “We have the honor to invite you to an encounter with the future – in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Not a purely digital economy but a real factory. Not robotized labor but a place where humans are essential. Because there is no future without people. Not a soulless facility but a place where art feels at home. Major new works by my friend Olafur Eliasson commissioned as permanent installations – for the workers, the city, and society. I believe there is no future without the inspiration of art”.

Throughout his career, Olafur Eliasson has endeavored to bring art to people beyond the boundaries of the museum – into cities, people’s lives, and everyday consciousness. A number of these works – such as Erosion, 1997, Double sunset, 1999 and The New York City Waterfalls, 2008 – have introduced elements of unpredictability, pause, and wonder into urban contexts, in order to invite inhabitants to question their well-known environment and make space for new stimuli and perceptions.

Dnepropetrovsk sunrise, which was specifically conceived for the INTERPIPE STEEL factory workers and the city of Dnepropetrovsk, is an excellent example of this endeavor. The 60-metre-tall artificial sun can be seen from all points of the compass; illuminated by floodlights at dawn and dusk, it appears as a permanently rising or setting sun.

Traffic entering and leaving the INTERPIPE STEEL facility will pass through Your time tunnel, a series of arcs constructed from pipes produced at the factory. Your heat mural, a group of giant thermal images on the factory’s façade, gives an abstract impression of the invisible heat produced by the manufacturing process inside. Material is movement, inside the main factory hall, echoes the forms found in the outdoor works with a series of circular and elliptical yellow reflective discs that are installed above the workers’ heads like a rising sun. Workers walking through the elevated walkway that connects the administrative spaces with the production hall will find themselves reflected endlessly within the mirror-clad walls and ceiling of Your thinking bridge.

About the artist

In 2003 Olafur Eliasson (born in 1967, IS/DK) represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale and installed The weather project at Tate Modern, London. The 2007 SFMOMA exhibition, Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, travelled until 2010. Innen Stadt Aussen (Inner City Out), 2010, and Seu corpo da obra (Your body of work), 2011, involved interventions across the cities of Berlin and Sao Paulo in addition to works in museums. Your emotional future, Eliassson’s first solo exhibition in Ukraine, was show at the PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, Ukraine last year. Projects in public space include Green river, realized between 1998 and 2001; The New York City Waterfalls, 2008; Your rainbow panorama, for ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum; and Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, with Henning Larsen Architects, 2011.

His latest project, Little Sun, is a solar-powered lamp developed together with Frederik Ottesen to improve the lives of people in off-grid regions. Around 55 craftsmen, architects, geometers, and art historians work in his Berlin studio. In 2009, as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Olafur Eliasson founded the Institut fur Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments).

About Victor Pinchuk

Victor Pinchuk is the founder of EastOne Ltd., Interpipe Company, and the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. Born in Kyiv in 1960, he graduated with honors from the Dnipropetrovs’k Metallurgical Institute in 1983 and earned a PhD degree in 1987. In 1990, he founded Interpipe Company on the basis of his patented innovations. In 2006, he founded EastOne Ltd., an international investment advisory company whose portfolio comprises more than 20 businesses and large-scale projects in Ukraine and internationally.

Mr. Pinchuk served two terms as a Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, from 1998 to 2006. In 2003, he decided to retire from politics to focus on his business and philanthropic activities.

In 2006, Mr. Pinchuk consolidated his numerous philanthropic activities under the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, the largest private Ukrainian philanthropic foundation. Its projects include a network of neonatal centres, the PinchukArtCentre, scholarship programs, the international independent organization Yalta European Strategy promoting Ukraine's European integration, human rights projects and the support of Jewish communities.

Mr. Pinchuk serves as a member of the Board of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, of the International Advisory Council of Brookings Institution and of the Corporate Advisory Board of the Global Business Coalition against HIV/AIDS. He was listed as one of the "2010 Time 100 - The World's Most Influential People" in Time Magazine in 2010, as #36 in the Power 100 ranking of ArtReview in 2011 and, for the fifth consecutive year, in the list of “The ARTnews 200 Top Collectors” in 2012.

Description of the works

Your time tunnel - large enough to encompass two lorries driving side by side, Your time tunnel consists of a series of arcs that form an impressive portal through which traffic flows into and out of the INTERPIPE STILL facility in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. Constructed from pipes produced at the factory, the elliptical and circular arcs derive from cross sections of a pipe taken at different angles. The appearance of the tunnel changes according to the vantage point from which it is viewed – whether you are inside or outside, moving or standing still. It cannot be grasped instantaneously as a single image, which makes the time it takes to view the shifting relationships of the circles and ellipses an important element in the work.

Your thinking bridge is a twenty-two-meter-long installation that occupies the entire length of the elevated walkway inside the Interpipe factory. The walls and ceiling of the enclosed bridge are covered with mirrors and metal. Two semi-spheres are attached to the mirrored surfaces at the juncture between the walls and ceilings, so that they appear as full spheres together with their reflections. Track lighting on the handrails and lights inside the spheres illuminate the passageway. The facing mirrors evoke an infinite space, in which the spheres and the workers moving through the walkway are endlessly reflected.

Material is movement, installed in the main hall of the factory, comprises a series of circular and elliptical discs made of reflective yellow glass. Lights, installed in the gap between the discs and the wall, create a soft glow around the circumferences of the discs. Progressing from circle to ever more elongated ellipses, the two-dimensional shapes produce the illusion of a disc becoming foreshortened as it spins in space.

Dnepropetrovsk sunrise is a 60-metre-tall, freestanding sun. Made out of two intersecting yellow, corrugated-metal ellipses supported by a scaffolding, the sun is illuminated at dusk and dawn, so that it is visible from all points of the compass. It can be seen from across the river, on the other side of town, as a permanently rising sun. Dnepropetrovsk sunrise is the natural pendant to Double sunset, 1999, in Utrecht, the Netherlands, where passers-by were confronted with the illusion of a second sun setting next to the real one. Double sunset, however, could only be correctly viewed from one perspective, since there was a clear front and back to the two-dimensional sun.

Your heat mural is a group of large-scale images on the factory façade. The effect is reminiscent of a thermal analysis of the interior; it seems to grant a view into the factory, except that it is not the actual contents of the building that are shown, but an abstract impression of what goes on inside, the invisible heat exuded by the manufacturing of still.