Olafur Eliasson
Installation artist of light and weather.
Olafur Eliasson created a giant sun inside Tate Modern. His works deal with light, water, climate and perception.
Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents and spent much time in Iceland as he grew up. Iceland's landscape, with its glaciers, waterfalls and shifting light, has shaped his art. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen from 1989 to 1995 and then set up a studio in Berlin.
His works are about how we experience the world through our senses. He creates rainbows, mist, waterfalls and light phenomena indoors, and often shows openly how they are made, with pumps, hoses and lamps. The point is to make viewers aware of their own seeing. He has said that he wants the audience to “see themselves seeing”.
His great breakthrough was The weather project in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in London in 2003. A semicircle of yellow lamps was reflected in a ceiling of mirrors and became a vast sun in a mist-filled hall. More than two million visitors came, and many lay down on the floor to see themselves in the ceiling. The same year he represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale. In 2008 he built four artificial waterfalls in New York Harbor, and in Aarhus his rainbow-coloured walkway Your rainbow panorama sits on the roof of the ARoS art museum.
In Berlin Eliasson runs a large studio with architects, craftspeople, researchers and cooks. He has designed buildings and bridges, including the façade of the Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík. Climate has become an increasingly important theme. In Ice Watch he had large blocks of ice from Greenland's melting ice sheet placed in cities such as Copenhagen, Paris and London, where they melted in front of the public. He has also founded Little Sun, a project providing solar lamps for people without electricity.
In 2015 Moderna Museet in Stockholm held a major exhibition of his work. Eliasson is one of the best-known artists in the world today, and his works have turned art about nature and perception into a public experience for millions.