Olafur Eliasson

His parents had emigrated to Copenhagen from Iceland in 1966, his father to find work as a cook and his mother as a seamstress.

He was 8 when his parents separated.

He lived with his mother and his stepfather, a stockbroker.

His father, then an artist, moved back to Iceland, where their family spent summers and holidays.

At 15, Olafur had his first solo show where he exhibited landscape drawings and gouaches at a small alternative gallery in Denmark.

Olafur Eliasson (Ólafur Elíasson; born 5 February 1967) is an Icelandic–Danish artist known for sculptured and large-scaled installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer's experience.

Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Elías Hjörleifsson and Ingibjörg Olafsdottir.

However, Olafur considered his "break-dancing" during the mid-1980s to be his first artworks.

With two school friends, he formed a group that called themselves the Harlem Gun Crew and with whom he performed at clubs and dance halls for four years, eventually winning the Scandinavian championship.

Olafur studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1989 to 1995.

In 1990, when he was awarded a travel budget by the Royal Danish Academy, Olafur went to New York where he started working as a studio assistant for artist Christian Eckart in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and reading texts on phenomenology and Gestalt psychology.

In 1995, Olafur established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research.

Olafur received his degree from the academy in 1995, after having moved in 1993 to Cologne for a year, and then to Berlin, where he has since maintained a studio.

In 1996, Olafur started working with Einar Thorsteinn, an architect and geometry expert 25 years his senior as well as a former friend of Buckminster Fuller.

The first piece they created called 8900054, was a stainless-steel dome 30 ft wide and 7 ft high, designed to be seen as if it were growing from the ground.

Though the effect is an illusion, the mind has a hard time believing that the structure is not part of a much grander one developing from deep below the surface.

Thorsteinn's knowledge of geometry and space has been integrated into Olafur's artistic production, often seen in his geometric lamp works as well as his pavilions, tunnels and camera obscura projects.

Ventilator (1997) swings back and forth and around, rotating on its axis.

Olafur has engaged in a number of public projects, including the intervention Green river, carried out in various cities between 1998 and 2001; the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, London, a temporary pavilion designed with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Trædal Thorsen; and The New York City Waterfalls, commissioned by Public Art Fund in 2008.

Olafur also created the Breakthrough Prize trophy.

Like much of his work, the sculpture explores the common ground between art and science.

It is molded into the shape of a toroid, recalling natural forms found from black holes and galaxies to seashells and coils of DNA.

Quadrible light ventilator mobile (2002–2007) is a rotating electrically powered mobile comprising a searchlight and four fans blowing air around the exhibition room and scanning it with the light cone.

Olafur represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The Weather Project, which has been described as "a milestone in contemporary art", in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London.

The weather project was installed at the London's Tate Modern in 2003 as part of the popular Unilever series.

The installation filled the open space of the gallery's Turbine Hall.

Olafur used humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air via a mixture of sugar and water, as well as a semicircular disc (reflected by the ceiling mirror to appear circular) made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light.

First located in a three-story former train depot right next door to the Hamburger Bahnhof, the studio moved to a former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg in 2008.

Studio Olafur Eliasson, which the artist founded as a "laboratory for spatial research", employs a team of architects, engineers, craftsmen, and assistants (some 30 members as of 2008) who work together to conceive and construct artworks such as installations and sculptures, as well as large-scale projects and commissions.

Olafur is influenced by Bruce Nauman, as well as James Turrell and Robert Irwin.

In a 2008 review of the Take Your Time retrospective (at the Museum of Modern Art), Peter Schjeldahl dubbed Ventilator "a witty finesse of the MOMA atrium’s space-splurging grandiosity"

Olafur was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014 and has been an adjunct professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa since 2014.

His studio is based in Berlin, Germany.

As professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Olafur Eliasson founded the Institute for Spatial Experiments (Institut für Raumexperimente, IfREX), which opened within his studio building in April 2009.

Huffington Post named Olafur one of "18 green artists who are making climate change and conservation a priority."

In 2014, Olafur and his long-time collaborator – German architect Sebastian Behmann – founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for architecture and art.

For many projects, the artist works collaboratively with specialists in various fields, among them the architects Thorsteinn and Sebastian Behmann (both of whom have been frequent collaborators, Behmann working on the Kirk Kapital headquarters on Vejle Fjord in Denmark, completed in 2018), author Svend Åge Madsen (The Blind Pavilion), landscape architect Gunther Vogt (The Mediated Motion), architecture theorist Cedric Price (Chaque matin je me sens différent, chaque soir je me sens le même), and architect Kjetil Thorsen (Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2007).

Nadine Wojcik, after attending the In real life exhibition in 2019, dubbed Beauty (1993) a "simple yet powerful water installation that evokes a rainbow via spotlights.” Anna Souter called the work "a reminder of the intensely fragile beauty of the natural world and its elements.

[...] it’s simply and superbly beautiful".

Early works by Olafur consist of oscillating electric fans hanging from the ceiling.