This exhibition was the first solo exhibition of work in the UK by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson since his acclaimed installation for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, The Weather Project in 2004. It included a major new commission, made in collaboration with scientist Boris Oicherman, a laboratory with apparatus for the purposes of exploring the way colour is perceived. Members of the public were invited to interact with the work and become observers in a psycho-physical experiment, measuring their own sensation of colour. Data was collected for analysis and displayed on gallery walls as printouts, revealing different responses to the same visual stimuli.
Eliasson’s colour research is an investigation into the diversity in seeing. It is based on his conviction that perception is not objective, but rather a cultural construction, determined by our habitat, memories, expectations, emotions, politics, economic interests and ethical concerns.

 Eliasson is internationally renowned for his works with light and other natural phenomena.  His installations are experimental, aiming to provoke visitors to reflect upon their own processes of perception and the discrepancy between knowledge assumed and that produced through actual experience. In this vein, also presented was the artist’s Colour Spectrum Series (2005), a reproduction of the entire colour spectrum in 48 monoprints. The sequence of graduated colours is handmade, as if to suggest that visual phenomena are dependent on human variability rather than a set of unchanging material facts.

Your Uncertainty of Colour Matching Experiment was kindly supported by The Royal Danish Embassy, the Henry Moore Foundation, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Birmingham Optical Group and Oculus.