Olafur Eliasson

Ólafur Elíasson (1967-) is a Danish artist of Icelandic origins, one of the most famous of his generation. A leading exponent of the environmental art movement, in his works Eliasson loves to reuse natural elements such as light, water and fire, recontextualizing them in a surprising way outside their traditional context. Founder in 1995 of the Berlin-based Studio Olafur Eliasson, the artist received wide international fame with his installation “The Weather Project” at the Tate Gallery in London (2003), which featured an enormous “artificial sun” projected by hundreds of small lamps and immersed in fog that filled the entire space, giving life to a magical and mysterious atmosphere. Given the monumental nature of his works, often playing on the theme of space, Eliasson has often worked on the edges of the world of architecture: an example of this tendency is the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (2007), co-signed with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Trædal Thorsen. Another characteristic often recognized by critics is the strong attention to environmental issues, protagonists for example of the installation Ice Watch (2014-2018), in which large blocks of ice are placed in the center of squares of various important European capitals and left to melt to make the effects of climate change evident. Olafur Eliasson has also made some special incursions into the world of product design through collaborations with brands such as Louis Poulsen and Moroso.