Ólafur Elíasson

Visual artist Ólafur Elíasson (b. 1967) grew up in Iceland and Denmark. In 1995, he founded Studio Ólafur Elíasson in Berlin, which today comprises a team of craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians. Natural phenomena—such as water, light, ice, fog, and reflections—feature prominently in Elíasson’s often large-scale artworks. His practice is driven by interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and the sense of self. He strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large, considering art a crucial means of turning thinking into doing in the world. Elíasson’s work spans sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. Not limited to the confines of the museum or gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and the climate crisis.

He is internationally renowned for works such as The Weather Project (2003), an indoor sun shrouded in mist installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, seen by more than two million people, and The New York City Waterfalls(2008), a public art project commissioned by the Public Art Fund with the support of former mayor Michael Bloomberg, for which he installed four artificial waterfalls along the Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines. Another acclaimed project in public space is Ice Watch, a public installation for which Elíasson and geologist Minik Rosing transported twelve massive blocks of glacial ice from Greenland to Copenhagen’s City Hall Square in 2014, to coincide with the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The project was reiterated in Paris (2015) and London (2018).

In 2012, he founded the social business Little Sun, and in 2014, he and Sebastian Behmann founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for art and architecture.