Olafur Eliasson is a Danish artist and sculptor, who represents Light and Space movement. Through his works, which employ elemental materials, such as light, water and air temperature, Olafur enhances the viewers' experience and activates their senses. Basically, his works are about the relationship between a viewer and an object, with the viewer's reactions being part of the work.
Background
Olafur Eliasson was born on February 5, 1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a son of Elías Hjörleifsson and Ingibjörg Olafsdottir. In 1966, one year before Olafur's birth, his parents immigrated to Copenhagen from Iceland. Ingibjörg Olafsdottir, Olafur's mother, found work as a dressmaker, while his father, Elías Hjörleifsson, who was an amateur artist, found work as a cook on a fishing boat.
When Olafur Eliasson was four years old, his parents divorced. At that time, his father returned to Iceland, leaving a young boy fatherless throughout much of his childhood and adolescence.
Education
Olafur Eliasson started to produce his works in his early years. By the time, when he was fourteen years old, he could draw every bone in the human body, and at the age of fifteen, he had his first art show, where he displayed several landscape paintings at an alternative art space in Denmark. As a teenager, Eliasson showed his love for art, but he didn't strive to become an artist. Instead, he spent most of his time breakdancing after discovering the dance form on an American television show. With two school friends, he formed a group, called "Harlem Gun Crew". They performed at clubs around Copenhagen and competed internationally, eventually winning the Scandinavian breakdancing championship twice.
Since 1989 to 1995, Olafur studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Shortly after graduation from Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, Eliasson began to exhibit his sculptures in galleries and museums around the world. The same year, in 1995, he founded his Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin. The studio, which initially was meant to be a "laboratory for spatial research", became a space to engage with architects, engineers, craftsman and assistants in order to conceive and construct large-scale projects, installations and sculptures, that embodied Eliasson's interests in perception, movement, experience and feelings of self within both the manmade and natural worlds.
In 1996, the artist collaborated with architect Einar Thorsteinn on the creation of the work "8900054". It was a 30-foot wide and seven-foot high stainless steel dome, that appeared to be growing directly from the ground. The piece caused viewers to reflect upon things, that are in constant development deep beneath ordinary surfaces. The following year, in 1997, Olafur contributed to Danish pavilion at the São Paulo Biennial. There, he got acquainted with Marianne Krogh Jensen, an art historian, who would later become his wife.
In 2009, Olafur started to work as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, a post he held till 2014, when he was appointed a professor at Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
In 2009, Eliasson explored light through alternative means in his "Your atmospheric colour atlas", which was exhibited at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Filling a gallery with fog and color, the exhibition invited visitors to blend into the spectrum, mixing light to create their own interpretations. Also, in 2012, he made Little Suns, portable solar lamps, which allow to see in the dark without access to electricity. Two years later, in 2014, Olafur, together with architect Sebastian Behmann, founded Studio Other Spaces, which focused on interdisciplinary and experimental building projects and works in public spaces.
During his lifetime, he held many exhibitions in different museums and galleries, including his first solo show in Cologne in 1993. Also, Olafur represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
Currently, he divides his time between Copenhagen, where his family lives, and his studios in Berlin. His studios now employ more than ninety workers, including artists, architects, scientists and technicians.
Olafur Eliasson is a famous Danish artist, who is mostly known for his installation "The Weather Project". He became a progressive leader in the kind of creative thinking, that provokes the way people perceive culture, community and the natural environment around them.
He founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, Studio Other Spaces and "Harlem Gun Crew".
Also, Eliasson received numerous awards, including Nykredit Architecture Prize (2004), Eckersberg Medal (2004), Prince Eugen Medal (2005) and others.
His works are kept in public and private collections of different museums and galleries, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tate in London and others.
Quotations:
"I always try to make work that activates the viewer to be a co-producer of our shared reality."
"Over the years, in making art, I have constantly explored issues dealing with space, time, light, and society. I am particularly interested in how the light of a space determines how we see that space and similarly, in how light and color are actually phenomena within us, within our own eyes."
"My goal is to formulate a new color theory based on the full spectrum of visible light."
"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."
"Light has an evident, functional and aesthetic impact on our lives."
"Artists are valuable to public discussion: They show the correlation between doing and thinking."
"I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that."
Membership
Together with his friends, Olafur founded "Harlem Gun Crew" — a group of breakdancers.
Personality
Olafur has a good command of four languages, namely Icelandic, Danish, German, and English.
Interests
Breakdance
Connections
Olafur Eliasson is married to Marianne Krogh Jensen. They adopted two children from Ethiopia — a son in 2003 and a daughter in 2006.
Father:
Elías Hjörleifsson
Mother:
Ingibjörg Olafsdottir
Wife:
Marianne Krogh Jensen
colleague:
Einar Thorsteinn
colleague:
Sebastian Behmann
References
Olafur Eliasson: Experience
The book provides an unparalleled overview of Olafur's creative output, which speaks to an astonishingly varied audience.
2018
Olafur Eliasson: Reality Machines
This superbly produced overview of his three-decade-long practice offers a full account of his numerous projects, from early pieces, such as Beauty (1993), in which a spotlight shines on the mist, produced by thousands of droplets, to the ambitious works, produced in his Berlin studio, where he collaborates with architects, art historians, technicians, engineers, designers and cooks.
