Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is an artist who was born in 1967 and grew up in Iceland and Denmark, where he studied from 1989 to 1995 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1995, he moved to Berlin and founded Studio Olafur Eliasson, which today comprises a vast team of craftspeople, architects, and specialised technicians. Eliasson works in a wide range of media, including installation, painting, sculpture, photography, and film, and since 1997, his solo shows have appeared in major museums around the world. He also represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.

In 2012, Eliasson founded the social business Little Sun that produces solar lamps for off-grid communities, and in 2014, he and architect Sebastian Behmann founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for art and architecture. Eliasson’s interest in polyhedra, spheres and curves can be seen throughout his work. This interest stems from a desire to create alternatives to the dominant orthogonal thinking of modern architecture, art, and design, to find forms that can help counteract the numbing of our senses.

"I believe it is important to have faith in the power of abstraction. In addition to showing us things that we may not yet know or telling us about the lives of others, art can, in itself, in what it demands of us, expand our capacity for feeling empathy for others and for the more-than-human world." - Olafur Eliasson