About Olafur Eliasson

Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1967, is renowned for large-scale public interventions, architectural projects and sculptures that use the natural elements – light, color, water, and movement – to alter viewers’ sensory perceptions. By enabling interaction between his artworks and the audience, Eliasson aims at evoking an awareness of the sublime world around us. Following the idea that “art does not end where the real world begins,” the artist creates seemingly magical artworks that are solely based in the natural world. “I want to expose and evaluate the fact that the seeing and sensing process is a system that should not be taken for granted as natural—it’s a cultivated means of reality production that, as a system, can be negotiated and changed,” the he stated.

With its masterful union of technology and primal elements, Olafur Eliasson’s art fulfills both longstanding artistic ideals and a new direction in contemporary artmaking. Despite being more concerned with perception than ecology, his artwork is intended to raise awareness of the climate crisis. For his project Ice Watch, Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing brought free-floating icebergs from a fjord outside Nuuk, Greenland, to public squares in European cities to manifest global warming.

In addition to his installation projects, limited editions play a crucial role in Olafur Eliasson’s oeuvre, allowing him to extend the experiential qualities of his large-scale installations into more personal, collectible formats. These editions, including prints, photographs and multiples, embody his exploration of sensory perception and environmental awareness, making his complex conceptual art accessible to a wider audience. In 1995, he founded Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research comprising over 100 people, including craftsmen, architects, and specialist technicians.

Notable exhibitions

Olafur Eliasson gained international acclaim with his participation in the 2003 Venice Biennale and his landmark installation The Weather Project at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall the same year, which brought immersive, atmospheric art into mainstream visibility.

Major solo exhibitions followed at institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2007), Museum of Modern Art in New York (2008), and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (2014). In 2019, a major retrospective titled In Real Life opened at Tate Modern and later traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao, cementing Eliasson’s reputation as a leading figure in contemporary art engaging with perception, ecology, and climate.