Latest exhibition!

Olafur Eliasson's latest exhibition, titled ''Between thinking and doing there is experience'', is presenting a series of artist's previous work in pictures trying to make obvious the difference between thinking and doing and the impact of experience upon them.The exhibition takes place in Tate Modern till the end of January.

Your rainbow panorama

In 2007 Eliasson's idea to an art work which could complete ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Aarhus got chosen among five other proposals in a bidding process by a panel of judges. Eliasson's artwork called “Your rainbow panorama” consists of circular, 150 feet long and three feet wide circular corridor made of glass in every color of the rainbow. The work has a diameter of 52 meters and is mounted on slender pillars 3.5 meters above the museum's roof. The artwork is at night lit up from the inside by spotlights in the floor. The project cost 60 million Danish kroner; construction began in May 2009 and was completed in May 2011.

Harpa (concert hall)

Eliasson designed the facade of Harpa, Reykjavík's new concert hall and conference centre which was completed in 2011. In close collaboration with his studio team and Henning Larsen Architects, the designers of the building, Eliasson has designed a unique facade consisting of large quasi bricks, a stackable twelve sided module in steel and glass. The facade will reflect the city life and the different light composed by the movements of the sun and varying weather. During the night the glass bricks are lit up by different colored LED lights. The building was opened on 13 May 2011.

Beauty - 1993

Beauty was presented first in 1993, and consisted in garden hoses punctured by holes from where water run off. Theses garden hoses are enlighted with flashing rhythmical lights.

This work is totally amazing. You are deepen into a big dark and silent room where people are struggling to take a picture of the work. The hoses seem like weird snakes possessed by some king of spirit. The water that run off divide itself into mountain of diamonds disappearing almost instantly in the darkness of the hall.

Lava floor - 2002

In 2002, The Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris featured an exhibtion entitled "Chaque matin je me sens différent. Chaque soir je me sens le même" (Each morning I feel different. Each evening I feel the same) Eliasson's work inside the exhibition was an installation on the floor of lavaro rock. Visitors were invited to walk across the uneven surface to reach the galleries as it was disposed on the lobby.” Bringing nature in museums and physically engage visitors are key points in his work.

The New York City Waterfalls - 2008

Olafur Eliasson installed his New York City Waterfalls at four carefully chosen locations along the banks of the East River from June through October 2008.
By manipulating the normally flat river into a series of waterfalls that ranged from 90 to 120 feet tall, Eliasson offered his urban audience a new kind of experience of nature. What’s more, by leaving the frames of the waterfalls undisguised, the artist evoked the scaffolding that can be seen across the city, testifying to the dynamic, constantly-changing fabric of the urban environment.
Eliasson’s Waterfalls were made possible by the support of New York City’s Public Art Fund, a non-profit organization established in 1977. The mission of the Public Art Fund, and other similar organizations, is to bring works of contemporary art out of museums and galleries and into open spaces where they can be experienced by a diverse urban public. The Public Art Fund works with established international artists as well as emerging local artists to help them realize projects that might impact the cultural life of New York. Like Eliasson, most of these artists create site-specific pieces that respond and bring new energy to the existing environment. In this way, public art projects such as the Waterfalls prompt inhabitants of the city to look at the urban landscape in new, different, and thought-provoking ways.

Source : www.learner.org

The weather project - 2003

The subject of the weather has long shaped the content of everyday conversation. The eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson famously remarked ‘It is commonly observed, that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm.’ In The Weather Project, the fourth in the annual Unilever Series of commissions for the Turbine Hall, Olafur Eliasson takes this ubiquitous subject as the basis for exploring ideas about experience, mediation and representation.
In this installation, The Weather Project, representations of the sun and sky dominate the expanse of the Turbine Hall. A fine mist permeates the space, as if creeping in from the environment outside. Throughout the day, the mist accumulates into faint, cloud-like formations, before dissipating across the space. A glance overhead, to see where the mist might escape, reveals that the ceiling of the Turbine Hall has disappeared, replaced by a reflection of the space below. At the far end of the hall is a giant semi-circular form made up of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps. The arc repeated in the mirror overhead produces a sphere of dazzling radiance linking the real space with the reflection. Generally used in street lighting, mono-frequency lamps emit light at such a narrow frequency that colours other than yellow and black are invisible, thus transforming the visual field around the sun into a vast duotone landscape.

Olafur Eliasson, born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Icelandic parents, studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts between 1989 and 1995.
In 2004 Eliasson told Berlin magazine 032c that his father was also an artist; in the same interview he also said that at one time he considered his "break-dancing" during the mid-1980s to be his first artworks. In 1990, when he was awarded a travel budget by the Royal Danish Academy of Arts, Eliasson went to New York where he started working as a studio assistant. He 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.First located in a warehouse right next door to the Hamburger Bahnhof, the studio moved to a former brewery in Prenzlauer Bergin 2008.
In 1996, Eliasson started working with Einar Thorsteinn, an architect and geometry expert 25 years his senior as well as a former friend of Buckminster Fuller's. The first piece they created called 8900054, was a stainless-steel dome 30 feet (9.1 m) wide and 7 feet (2.1 m) 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 Eliasson's artistic production, often seen in his geometric lamp works as well as his pavilions, tunnels and camera obscura projects.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), 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). Today, Studio Olafur Eliasson is a laboratory for spatial research that employs a team of c. 30 architects, engineers, craftsmen, and assistants who work together to conceptualize, test, engineer, and construct installations, sculptures, large-scale projects, and commissions.
As professor at Universität der Künste Berlin, Olafur Eliasson founded the Institute for Spatial Experiments (Institut für Raumexperimente, IfREX), which opened within his studio building in April 2009.

Who is Olafur Eliasson?

Olafur Eliasson is not a traditional artist. His best-known works cannot be hung on a wall and do not involve paint or a camera or sculpting materials. Eliasson creates what is known as installation art. This unconventional modern art form can be described as art that viewers must walk through or around to experience. Installation art is usually created for a particular space, whether inside a museum or outside in a field, and for a particular period of time. It cannot be owned by collectors or museums: it exists for a time, and then it is taken down. It cannot be preserved for future generations, except through words and photographs.

Eliasson's works make use of natural elements, including light, water, fire, and wood, and he often combines these elements to re-create the outdoors inside, producing effects such as an indoor waterfall or rainbow. The artist has been displaying his works for the public since the mid-1990s, gaining an ever-larger following among art lovers.

Read more: http://www.notablebiographies.com/news/Ca-Ge/Eliasson-Olafur.html#ixzz2IdSA09za