Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson (born February 5, 1967, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish artist whose sculptures and large-scale installation art employ elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience of the ordinary.

Early life, education, an beginnings of artistic career

Eliasson spent his childhood in Denmark and Iceland, where the unique terrain informed his interest in nature as artistic material. From 1989 to 1995 he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He began to receive international attention in the early 1990s with groundbreaking sculptures and installations that employed illusory tools along with intentionally simple mechanics. Later in his career he divided his time between Copenhagen and his studio in Berlin, where projects were conceptualized and constructed by a team of architects, engineers, and assistants.

Early projects

Eliasson’s early interest in natural phenomena and perception led him to create works that simultaneously sparked and challenged the senses. In Your Strange Certainty Still Kept (1996), droplets of water were frozen in midair through the use of a perforated hose and strobe lights. Ventilator (1997) incorporated a menacing electric fan swinging from a ceiling. In Room for One Colour (1997), he flooded a room with saturated yellow light, causing all other colors to be perceived as black. Conversely, in 360° Room for All Colours (2002), a circular space changed colors almost imperceptibly.

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The Weather Project and other built environments

Eliasson increasingly focused on built environments and site-specific works. In 2003 he represented Denmark in the 50th Venice Biennale with The Blind Pavilion, an architectural structure made of alternating black opaque and transparent glass panels that created disorienting reflections for visitors walking through.

Also in 2003 he exhibited The Weather Project at Tate Modern in London. He transformed the museum’s Turbine Hall with a 50-foot (15-meter) in diameter orb resembling a dark afternoon sun made of 200 yellow lamps, diffusing screen, fog, and mirrors. During its five-month installation, more than two million visitors basked in the sun’s artificial glow, interacting with the constructed environment as if it were the product of nature. With these projects and others, Eliasson kept a consistent emphasis on the critical role of the viewer in the materialization of the artwork, such that the experience remained transformative, varied, and ultimately dependent on its audience.

In 2008 he created four man-made waterfalls for New York City’s waterfront. For three and a half months, the waterfalls’ scaffolding structures, which ranged from 90 to 120 feet (27 to 36 meters) high and up to 45 feet (14 meters) across, pumped cascades of water into the East River in Lower Manhattan.

Your Rainbow Panorama, Fjordenhus, and other architectural projects

Eliasson’s work expanded into other disciplines in the 2010s, including architecture. The permanent installation Your rainbow panorama was constructed atop the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2011. Comprising a circular walkway encased in colored glass, the piece, as its name suggests, offered patrons panoramic views through a spectrum of colors. Eliasson also collaborated with Henning Larsen Architects to design the facade of the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre (2011) in Reykjavík, Iceland. Using the local basalt formations as inspiration, Eliasson designed hexagonal glass panes that reflected light in such a way that the building seemed to glisten.

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Eliasson then established the firm Studio Other Spaces with architect Sebastian Behmann in 2014. Their first independently designed building, Fjordenhus (2018), was constructed partially submerged in a fjord in Vejle, Denmark. Critics commended the brick building’s innovative location, considered use of space, and elegant sculptural form.

Little Sun and Ice Watch

Eliasson also ventured into product design, founding the business Little Sun in 2012 with engineer Frederik Otteson. Through the sale of a solar-powered lamp that the partners designed, the company sought to provide light to areas of the world that did not have access to electricity. Eliasson’s art from this period included multiple installations of imported icebergs from Greenland, which were arranged in the public spaces of such cities as Copenhagen (2014), Paris (2015), and London (2018) during critical conferences on climate change. In an effort to render the abstract concept of global warming tangible, each installation of Ice Watch invited visitors to interact with the ice and observe as it melted.

Exhibitions and honors

Comprehensive exhibitions on Eliasson’s work comprised “Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson” (2007) at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; “Your Curious Journey” (2024) at the Singapore Art Museum; and “Olafur Eliasson: OPEN” (2024) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His honors include the 2023 Praemium Imperiale in sculpture, awarded by the Japan Art Association.