Art: Tomás Saraceno shoots gallery visitors into orbit with striking new work

Date
27 June 2013

Tomás Saraceno is the go-to artist if you like your art to involve simulated flight, terrifying heights and confronting your rational fears within the four walls of a gallery. He’s unwaveringly motivated by a desire to create work that reflects an idea of weightlessness and explores classical ideas of celestial space within an enclosed environment. Last year Tomás astounded us with On Space Time Foam at the Hangar Boca, Milan, where he allowed visitors to leap across an elevated transparent membrane that acted as a kind of inverted swimming pool. This year his creations are equally ambitious and actually much loftier than before (25 metres high to be precise).

In Orbit is currently on show at the K21 Ständenhaus in Düsseldorf and allows visitors to traverse a multi-layered installation of suspended steel nets, interspersed with giant reflective orbs. From these elevated vantage points viewers are encouraged to examine the view below and confront their own innate fear of falling. For those that can’t bear to confront that fear, the view from the gallery floor offers a strange perspective of the floating participants and reflective planets that teeter in the space above. But who wants to be stuck on the gallery floor when you could be launching yourself into the abyss!

In Orbit is on show at K21 Ständenhaus, Düsseldorf indefinitely.

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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Tomás Saraceno: In Orbit

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About the Author

James Cartwright

James started out as an intern in 2011 and came back in summer of 2012 to work online and latterly as Print Editor, before leaving in May 2015.

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