Olafur Eliasson
Danish-Icelandic Sculptor, Painter, Photographer, and Designer
Movements and Styles: Installation Art, Environmental Art, Institutional Critique, The Sublime in Art
Born: February 5, 1967 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Table of contents
> Summary> Key Ideas
> Artworks
> Biography & Legacy
Influences and Connections
Resources
"I was interested in how we engage the world. How do we use our skin as our eyes?"
Summary of Olafur Eliasson
A noted member of the Social Practice movement, Olafur Eliasson injects his work with a universal conscience that catapults art outside of its normal confines and challenges the way we inhabit the world. With each endeavor, he asks people to fully embody their human experience by expanding their feelings of self into a connection with the broader public sphere. His art is derived through a sincere practice in which he collaborates with experts in various fields to create diverse pieces intended to propose critical interventions within existing social systems, an effort that is designed to inspire debate and fresh perceptions, or to catalyze change. Eliasson has become a progressive leader in the kind of creative thinking that provokes the way people perceive culture, community, and the natural environment around them. Although his career has reached iconic status, Eliasson's core motivations set him apart from other superstars of the art world; whereas some artists of his stature are known for their superegos, altruism is the dominant trait in his reputation.
Key Ideas
Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1967, a year after his 21-year-old parents, Elías Hjörleifsson and Ingibjörg Olafsdottir, immigrated to the city from Iceland. His mother, who was from an Icelandic fishing village dating back to the 11th century, found work as a dressmaker, while his father, who was an amateur artist, found work as a cook on a fishing boat. His father's family was from Reykjavík, Iceland's capital, where they were part of a small artistic community. Eliasson's grandmother was a photographer and his grandfather, who abandoned his family when Elías was young, was a publisher of avant-garde literature. Eliasson's own parents, who were young and inexperienced, divorced when he was four. Elías, following in his own father's footsteps, moved back to Iceland, leaving a young Olafur fatherless throughout much of his childhood and adolescence. During his infrequent trips to visit his father, Eliasson began making drawings as a way to impress him. By the time he was 14 he could draw every bone in the human body, and at 15, he had his first art show - displaying several landscape paintings at an alternative art space in Denmark.
Important Art by Olafur Eliasson | |
 Artwork Images | Beauty (1993)Artwork description & Analysis: Since the beginning of his career, Eliasson has endeavored to conceive visually impactful work with sincerity rather than irony. Completed while still a student at the Royal Danish Academy of Art, Beauty consists of a single spotlight illuminating a section of perforated tubing. When water is pumped through the tube, thousands of tiny water droplets cascade out, producing a curtain of mist, which then reflects the light to produce a rainbow. The sublime work both glorifies and dissects an environmental wonder, revealing Eliasson's unique ability to poetically interpret a scientific process. Spotlight, water, nozzles and hose - Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles |
 Artwork Images | Ventilator (1997)Artwork description & Analysis: Like Beauty before it, Eliasson's early works were typically sculptural structures built specifically for a space within a museum or gallery. Ventilator, his most celebrated early work, was a subtle kinetic sculpture first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The simple, hypnotic piece consisted of a fan, hung from an electric cord and propelled haphazardly around the room in concordance with the ambient air currents. Its mesmerizing movement, sometimes zooming over head while other times hovering indecisively, emphasized the grandness of the museum's atrium, while also calling attention to the emptiness of the space. Altered fan, wire, and cable - Museum of Modern Art, New York |
 Artwork Images | Green river (1998)Artwork description & Analysis: In 1998, rather than reproducing natural phenomenon in an indoor setting, Eliasson began working with the environment directly. His first landscape intervention was Green river, a guerilla-style piece, in which he covertly changed the color of rivers in various cities by treating them with a harmless green dye used by biologists to track water currents. As Eliasson recalled, "what the green dye did, in my view, was it made people aware of their everyday surroundings in a new way - not just the river, which suddenly appeared different, but the town or landscape it was flowing through. We tend to see cities and spaces as static images, but in fact they are changing all the time. Sometimes it takes a radical shift to make us aware of this fact." Uranine and water - Moss, Norway |
More Olafur Eliasson Artwork and Analysis:
Influences and Connections
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Content compiled and written by Katelyn Davis
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Kimberly Nichols
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Katelyn Davis
Edited and revised, with Synopsis and Key Ideas added by Kimberly Nichols
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First published on 10 Jan 2018. Updated and modified regularly. 
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