Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson was born in 1967 in Iceland, and he grew up in Denmark. He is a visual artist who works in a wide range of media, including installation, painting, sculpture, photography, and film. He currently lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.

Since 1997, his critically acclaimed solo shows have appeared around the world in major museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, SESC Belenzinho, SESC Pompeia, and Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo, and the Venice Biennale. In 2003, his hugely popular The Weather Project, installed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London, was seen by more than two million people. In 2010, Eliasson created Feelings are Facts at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, together with the architect Ma Yansong. The solo exhibition “We Have Never Been Disembodied” took place in 2015 at Mirrored Gardens, outside Guangzhou. His most recent solo exhibition in China is “Nothingness is Not Nothing at All” at Shanghai’s Long Museum in 2016. Eliasson’s projects in public space include Green River, realized in various cities between 1998 and 2001, The New York City Waterfalls in 2008, the facades of Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall and Conference Centre (in collaboration with Henning Larsen Architects) from 2005 to 2011, and Cirkelbroen in Copenhagen in 2015.

Established in Berlin in 1995, his studio team now numbers about ninety people and includes craftsmen, technicians, architects, archivists, administrators, and cooks. The team engages in experimentation, research, and communication, and works with Eliasson to develop, produce, and archive his artworks and exhibitions.

From 2009 to 2014, Eliasson led the Institut fu?r Raumexperimente as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, and, in 2014, he became an adjunct professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

In 2014, Eliasson and long-time collaborator Sebastian Behmann founded an international office for art and architecture, Studio Other Spaces, to focus on interdisciplinary and experimental building projects and works in public space.

In 2012, Eliasson and engineer Frederik Ottesen founded Little Sun, a social business that develops, produces, and distributes solar lamps for use in off-grid communities.