Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson
Ólafur Elíasson in 2015.
Born	Ólafur Elíasson 1967 (age 49–50) Copenhagen, Denmark
Nationality	Icelandic-Danish
Known for	Installation art

Olafur Eliasson (Icelandic: Ólafur Elíasson; born 1967) is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research. Olafur represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London.

Olafur has engaged in a number of projects in public space, 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 Thorsen; and The New York City Waterfalls, commissioned by Public Art Fund in 2008. He was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014 and is an adjunct professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa since 2014.

Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Elías Hjörleifsson and Ingibjörg Olafsdottir. His parents had emigrated to Copenhagen from Iceland in 1966, he to find work as a cook, and she 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 he had his first solo show, exhibiting landscape drawings and gouaches at a small alternative gallery in Denmark. However, Olafur considered his "break-dancing" during the mid-1980s to be his first artworks. With two school friends, he formed a group — they called themselves the Harlem Gun Crew — and they 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 Eckhart in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and reading texts on phenomenology and Gestalt psychology.