The works of artist Olafur Eliasson explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Born in 1967, Eliasson grew up in Iceland and Denmark, where he 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 vast team of craftspeople, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, programmers, art historians, and specialised technicians.
Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows – featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film – have appeared in major museums around the globe. He represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The weather project, an enormous artificial sun shrouded in mist, in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London.
In 2019, In real life, a wide-ranging survey exhibition of Eliasson’s artistic practice, opened at Tate Modern, in London, before travelling to Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020. Olafur Eliasson: Symbiotic seeing opened at Kunsthaus Zürich in January 2020, and Sometimes the river is the bridge was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo from April to September 2020. For the exhibition Life, in 2021, Eliasson removed the glass facade of the Fondation Beyeler, in Basel, Switzerland, and conducted the bright green waters of the existing pond into the museum’s galleries, along with a host of aquatic plants and the odd duck or spider. 2022 saw two large-scale solo exhibitions in Italy – Nel tuo tempo (In your time), at Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence, and Orizzonti tremanti (Trembling horizons), at Castello di Rivoli, in Turin. In 2023, الصحراء تعانق الخيال (The curious desert) spanned two locations in Qatar: a broad selection of watercolours, paintings, photographic series, and geometrical sculptures on view at the National Museum of Qatar, in Doha, and a series of twelve experimental pavilions situated in the desert near the Al Thakhira Mangrove Forest nature preserve.
For OPEN, at the Geffen at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2024, Eliasson installed large-scale site-specific kaleidoscopic artworks that opened the museum up to the world outside. Further exhibitions in 2024 include Senin beklenmedik karşılaşman (Your unexpected encounter), at Istanbul Modern, and Your curious journey, which opened at Singapore Art Museum (SAM) in May and travelled to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand in December. In 2025, the exhibition will be on view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, after which it will travel to Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia, and conclude at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, in Manila, the Philippines.
Over the years, Eliasson has produced numerous projects in public space, including Green river, carried out in various cities between 1998 and 2001; the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, designed together with architect Kjetil Thorsen; and The New York City Waterfalls, installed along the city’s waterfronts in 2008. In 2014 Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing brought free-floating icebergs from a fjord outside Nuuk, Greenland, to a public square in Copenhagen for the first time for Ice Watch (Ice Watch: Copenhagen, 2014; Paris, 2015; and London, 2018). On the occasion of the 2020 German Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Eliasson created Earth Speakr together with children around the world and with support from the German Federal Foreign Office. In 2024, Eliasson broadcast Lifeworld on screens in iconic public spaces around the world, including Piccadilly Circus; Time Square; and K-Pop Square, Seoul. Commissioned by CIRCA, the short, blurred sequences transported passers-by into a space of uncertainty unlike the highly defined city spaces they are used to.
Many of Eliasson’s public artworks are permanent structures that take on an architectural scale. Your rainbow panorama, a circular coloured-glass walkway atop ARoS Museum, Aarhus, Denmark, opened in 2011. Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre, 2011, for which Eliasson created the facades in collaboration with Henning Larsen Architects, won the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2013. Fjordenhus in Vejle, Denmark, the first building designed entirely by Eliasson and the architectural team at Studio Olafur Eliasson, was completed in June 2018. In 2022, Eliasson opened سفر الظلال في بحر النهار (Shadows travelling on the sea of the day), a cluster of large-scale site-specific mirror pavilions in the Qatari desert outside Doha. Public works completed in 2024 include the colourful altar windows of the cathedral of St. Nicholas, in Greifswald, Germany, titled Fenster für bewegtes Licht (Window for moving light), and 숨결의 지구 (Breathing earth sphere) on Docho Island, in South Korea.
In 2014, Eliasson formed Studio Other Spaces with his long-time collaborator, architect Sebastian Behmann. The office for art and architecture focuses on interdisciplinary and experimental building projects and works in public space: www.studiootherspaces.net.
A comprehensive archive of the activities of the Institut für Raumexperimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments; 2009–14), the five-year experimental programme in arts education that Eliasson led as professor at the University of the Arts, Berlin, is accessible online at www.raumexperimente.net.
In 2012 Eliasson founded Little Sun together with engineer Frederik Ottesen. The social business continues to work with off-grid communities in sub-Saharan Africa and spreads awareness about the need to expand access to clean, sustainable energy to all www.littlesun.com.
In 2019 Eliasson was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for renewable energy and climate action by the United Nations Development Programme.
Eliasson lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.