Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967, Copenhagen, Denmark) is a Danish-Icelandic artist who lives and works between Copenhagen and Berlin. He studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin in 1995. His practice encompasses sculpture, large-scale installation, painting, photography, and film, and consistently engages the perception of light, color, temperature, and movement as experiential phenomena.

His work ranges from intimate studio experiments to public commissions on an architectural scale. The Weather Project (Tate Modern, 2003), which filled the Turbine Hall with an artificial sun and a ceiling of mirrors, became one of the most visited installations in the history of Tate Modern. New York City Waterfalls (2008) installed four artificial waterfalls along the banks of the East River. Among the most significant public interventions of recent decades, his work has also been pursued through institutional and educational initiatives: the Institut für Raumexperimente, which he founded at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014, placed education and collaboration at the center of artistic production. Since 2012, his non-profit Little Sun has distributed solar lamps to communities without reliable electricity.

Eliasson has had major retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2012), the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Tate Modern / Martin-Gropius-Bau (2019). His work is held by MoMA, Tate, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou, and major collections worldwide.