Art Within Reach

Artist / Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson, born in 1967, is a Danish Icelandic artist. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1989 to 1995. 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. In 2014, Eliasson and his long-time collaborator, architect Sebastian Behmann formed the office for art and architecture Studio Other Spaces to focus on interdisciplinary and experimental building projects and works in public space.

Eliasson has created a broad body of work that includes installations, paintings, sculptures, photography. Currently, he lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.

Olafur Eliasson is best known for his astonishing creativity in disruptive artistic forms and experiences. With the help of light, color, water, sky, and temperature, he can transform the vast empty space into an artificial environment that can bring mysterious experiences to the audience. At the intersection of nature, art, and science, Eliasson's works invite the audience to immerse themselves in it, guiding people to pay attention to individual perceptual changes through experience.

Eliasson creatively uses materials such as water, fog, ice and snow, refraction and reflection of light, mirrors, geometric models, kaleidoscope structures, pinhole imaging, various metals, glass, new chemical and electronic products in his works. Therefore, it is often necessary to study a large number of natural scientific materials, and the production process is extremely complex. Every detail of the work must go through careful design and rigorous experimentation, even like real scientific research.

In Shadows travelling on the sea of the day, each shelter comprises a circular disc supported by a semi-circular segment of pipe. The underside of each disc is clad with mirrors, so that the curved segment of pipe is doubled into a full ring that appears to be passing through the mirror’s surface from the actual surroundings into the reflected space. Eliasson hopes to create a space for the audience to resynchronize with the Earth and guide them to engage in dialogue on local climate actions.

This hanging sculpture combines two irregular polyhedra, embedding one within the other to form a single spheroid made of partially reflective, translucent filter glass and thin stainless steel struts. Depending on the lighting conditions and the position of the viewer, the artwork changes appearance as the panes of partially reflective filter glass catch the light and reflect the surroundings.

An ephemeral work that changes in appearance according to the qualities of the sunlight and the wind, Fog assembly produces a continual outpouring of swirling mist that dissolves the boundaries and outlines of the objects it encounters. This lively cloud, emitted from a vast ring positioned several metres above the grassy lawn of the pentagonal Bosquet de l’Etoile, invites visitors’ active engagement and participation.

Your rainbow panorama is a work that can be traversed without any beam or column structure, providing a flowing viewing experience, and only in action can color changes be felt. From a distance, it hangs like a rainbow between the city and the sky.

In The weather project, Eliasson employed a semi-circular screen, a ceiling of mirrors, and artificial mist to create a sunset scene in the Turbine Hall at Tate Gallery, London, in 2003. The sun is composed of hundreds of single frequency lights, and the air is filled with artificial fog, making the perception of the entire space extremely strong.

Global Exhibitions

Tate Modern
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Guggenheim Bilbao
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
SESC Pompeia leisure center
Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo
Venice Biennale

Important Awards

the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, 2014
the Wolf Prize in Painting and Sculpture, 2014
the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award, 2013
the Joan Miró Prize, 2007
the 3rd Benesse Prize, 1999

This article is sourced from the official website of Olafur Eliasson.