Olafur Eliasson

Biography

Eliasson considered his first artworks to be not drawings but break-dancing. In the mid-1980s he formed a group called the Harlem Gun Crew with two school friends; for four years they performed in clubs and dance halls and eventually won the Scandinavian championship.

He was born on 5 February 1967 in Copenhagen. His parents had come there from Iceland a year earlier: his father to find work, his mother as a seamstress. When the boy was eight, his parents separated. He stayed with his mother and stepfather, while his father, an artist, moved back to Iceland, where the family spent summers and holidays. Iceland would later become the main subject of his photographs. At fifteen Eliasson had his first solo show: landscape drawings and gouaches at a small alternative gallery in Denmark.

From 1989 to 1995 he studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In 1990 the academy gave him a travel grant; he went to New York, worked as a studio assistant to the artist Christian Eckart in Brooklyn and read texts on phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. In 1993 he moved to Cologne for a year, where his first solo show was held with Nicolaus Schafhausen. Then he settled in Berlin. He took his degree in 1995 and in the same year founded Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, which he calls a laboratory for spatial research. It first occupied a former three-storey train depot next to the Hamburger Bahnhof and in 2008 moved to a former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg. Today architects, engineers, craftspeople, art historians, programmers and even cooks work there: about thirty people in 2008, noticeably more later.

Since 1996 he has worked with Einar Thorsteinn, an architect and expert in geometry who is twenty-five years his senior and was acquainted with Buckminster Fuller. Their first piece, 8900054, was a stainless-steel dome about nine metres wide that seemed to grow out of the ground. Since 2001 Eliasson has collaborated with the German architect Sebastian Behmann, and in 2014 they founded the office Studio Other Spaces. From 2009 to 2014 he taught at the Berlin University of the Arts and set up its Institute for Spatial Experiments.

His early pieces are simple: fans swinging from the ceiling. In 1998 he discovered that uranin, a non-toxic powder used to trace leaks in pipes, turns a river a sickly fluorescent green. The project “Green river” was carried out in Berlin, Moss (Norway), Bremen, Los Angeles, Stockholm and Tokyo, always without warning. In Stockholm passers-by at first thought the city’s water had been poisoned. People’s reactions became part of the work.

In 2003 Eliasson represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale, and that autumn he opened “The Weather Project” in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. A mirror covered the ceiling of the hall, a fine mist of sugar and water hung in the air, and at the far end a semicircle of hundreds of monofrequency lamps glowed. The mirror completed it into a full circle, and in its light every colour except yellow and black disappeared. Visitors lay on their backs and waved their arms, watching their own dark silhouettes in the mirror. Over six months about two million people reportedly saw the installation.

Projects followed one after another. In 2007, with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, he built the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London. In June 2008, commissioned by the Public Art Fund, he installed four artificial waterfalls in New York, 90 to 120 feet high, at the Brooklyn Bridge, on piers and off Governors Island; they ran until 13 October. The project cost about $15.5 million. In 2011 the Icelandic concert hall Harpa opened in Reykjavik; he designed its glass facade of multifaceted modules together with Henning Larsen Architects. That same year a circular glass walkway, “Your rainbow panorama”, appeared above the roof of the ARoS museum in Aarhus: 150 metres of coloured glass with a view over the city. In 2012, with the engineer Frederik Ottesen, he founded Little Sun, a company that makes solar-powered LED lamps. In 2014 and 2015 he brought blocks of ice from Greenland to Copenhagen and Paris (the project “Ice Watch”), and in 2018 showed them in London as well. The pedestrian bridge Cirkelbroen in Copenhagen, designed by his studio, opened in 2015. To my mind his method is clearest in “Riverbed” (2014): in a gallery of the Louisiana Museum near Copenhagen he brought rocks, earth and water and turned the room into a riverbed.

His awards include the Eckersberg Medal (2004), the Crown Prince Couple’s Culture Prize (2006), the Joan Miró Prize (2007), the Goslar Kaiserring (2013), the Mies van der Rohe Award for Harpa (2013) and the Praemium Imperiale (2023). He is a knight of the Icelandic Order of the Falcon and an officer of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives and works in Berlin and Copenhagen.