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Olafur Eliasson is a Danish–Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. Eliasson’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. He strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world.
Eliasson was born in 1967. He grew up in Iceland and Denmark and studied from 1989 to 1995 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today comprises a large team of craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, programmers, art historians, and specialised technicians. Since the mid-1990s, Eliasson has realised numerous major exhibitions and projects around the world.
Eliasson’s works span sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and climate change.
Algae window, 2020
BEAUTY, 1993
Since the beginning of his career, Eliasson has endeavored to conceive visually impactful work with sincerity rather than irony. Completed while still a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, Beauty consists of a single spotlight illuminating a section of perforated tubing. When water is pumped through the tube, thousands of tiny water droplets cascade out, producing a curtain of mist, which then reflects the light to produce a rainbow. The sublime work both glorifies and dissects an environmental wonder, revealing Eliasson's unique ability to poetically interpret a scientific process.
THE WEATHER PROJECT, 2003
Eliasson's ability to combine art, science, and natural phenomena to enhance the viewer's experience reached its apex when he began creating fully immersive installations on a grand scale. The grand volume of Tate Modern Turbine hall is nothing but an illusion created by the mirrored ceiling. The semi-circular glass with a halo of monochromatic lights makes it a round sun when seen. The fog all around the hall creates fuzzy feelings of a bleak sunny day. People seen on the floor, laying and cherishing their reflection in the ceiling at Tate Modern is what ‘The weather project’ is about! And by bringing the sun indoors, people were encouraged to reconsider their relationship with an object of extraordinary beauty, which had otherwise become nonchalantly familiar.
YOUR RAINBOW PANORAMA, 2011
In 2007 Eliasson and his studio won an invited architectural competition with a proposal to transform the rooftop of ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, in Denmark, which was built by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects. Installed in 2011, Your rainbow panorama offers visitors sweeping views of the city, the sky, and the distant horizon. The elevated 360-degree walkway Your rainbow panorama is 150 metres around and glazed with rainbow-coloured glass. Visible from afar, the work divides Aarhus into various colour zones and acts as a beacon for people moving about the city – an effect that is heightened at night when lights running the circumference of the walkway illuminate it from within.
PALACE OF VERSAILLES, 2016
In 2016, Eliasson was invited to create a site-specific installation at the Chateau de Versailles. He took the opportunity to further his Social Practice's spotlight onto climate change by including a triptych of water-related projects on the palace grounds.
The most seminal piece was Waterfall, in which an immense stream of water fell from a construction crane, constructed of yellow steel to emulate the gold in the nearby Apollo's garden. The viewer witnessed not only the gorgeous waterfall, but also the machinations of man, which created it. It provoked reflection on our human impetus to use and manipulate natural resources for the pleasure of our egos. Another piece, Glacial rock flour garden, consisted of 150 tons of granite rock imported from Greenland, which had been ground down by glacial erosion. It was laid down around a statue of Persephone, the goddess of spring, to invoke reflection on the loss of nature. As visitors strolled through the gardens, they also experienced Fog assembly, an ethereal emission of white mist clouds, which lent an eerie, unsettling feel to the experience.
THE UNSPEAKABLE OPENNESS OF THINGS, 2018
Olafur Eliasson presents the Unspeakable Openness of Things as part of his first solo exhibition in Beijing. The extensive exhibit comprises an array of large-scale immersive installations, sculptures and works on paper by Eliasson with each space conjuring a discrete environment dedicated to a specific natural phenomenon, such as light, fog, shadow, water, geometry, and movement. The large scale work comprises a giant ring of light which casts an warmly saturated orange light upon the space. It comes after a report earlier this year revealed that China has issued an ‘orange alert’ for Beijing and other cities, which is the second highest warning in its four-tier air quality monitoring system.
REALITY PROJECTOR, 2018
Filling the vast 13,500 square-foot theater gallery at Los Angeles’ Marciano Art Foundation, ‘Reality Projector’ is an abstract, three-dimensional film-based installation. The seemingly simple, yet highly complex artwork integrates projected light into the existing architecture of the space to create a dynamic shadow play. Driven by an interest in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self, Eliasson seeks to engage the broader public sphere through this careful architectural intervention.
SEEING SPHERES, 2019
Seeing spheres consists of five five-metre-tall polished hydroformed steel spheres that stand in a circle around a central space. Each sphere supports a flat, circular mirror, framed by a ring of LEDs, which is oriented inwards to face the mirrors of the surrounding spheres. Together they produce a surprising environment of multilayered, reflected spaces in which the same people and settings appear again and again, visible from various unexpected angles. Tunnel-like sets of nested reflections open up in the mirrors, repeating countless times and disappearing into the distance.
Source: olafureliasson.net; theartstory.org; designboom.com