Olafur Eliasson (Icelandic: Ólafur Elíasson; born 5 February 1967)[1] 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 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",[2] in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London.

[8] 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.

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.

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.

[12] 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),[13] 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).

[citation needed] 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 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)[20] made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light.

The ceiling of the hall was covered with a huge mirror, in which visitors could see themselves as tiny black shadows against a mass of orange light symbolizing the sun.

[23] It remains his most famous work[6][4] and ranked 11th in a poll by The Guardian of the best art since 2000, with Jonathan Jones describing Olafur as "one of the century’s most significant artists.".

Another installation, 360 degrees Room For All Colours (2002), is a round light-sculpture where participants lose their sense of space and perspective, and experience being subsumed by an intense light.

[27] After attending the 2019 In real life exhibition, Souter deemed Your blind passenger one of Olafur's finest works, reporting that she felt "alone in the universe.

In 1998, Olafur discovered that uranin, a readily available nontoxic powder used to trace leaks in plumbing systems, could dye entire rivers a sickly fluorescent green.

Olafur conducted a test run in the Spree River during the 1998 Berlin Biennale, scattering a handful of powder from a bridge near Museum Island.

He began introducing the environmentally safe dye to rivers in Moss, Norway (1998), Bremen (1998), Los Angeles (1999), Stockholm (2000) and Tokyo (2001) — always without advance warning.

Olafur captures physical phenomena in a way that appears both real and slightly artificial, while contained in a constructed space that invites viewers to participate.

In a 2014 review of the exhibition, Svava Riesto and Henriette Steiner said that Olafur "cuts us off from the surroundings and imports a different and rough beauty"; they described the view of the stony landscape as "meticulously framed".

Based on the hydrogen-powered[7] BMW H2R concept vehicle, Olafur and his team removed the automobile's alloy body and instead replaced it with a new interlocking framework of reflective steel bars and mesh.

The 100-foot-diameter (30 m) island is composed of a cut-bluestone, compass-like floor pattern (based upon meridian lines and navigational charts), on top of which 30 river-washed boulders create an outdoor seating area for students and the public to gather.

With the installation of enormous ice blocks in various places of the world (Copenhagen in 2014, Paris in 2015 and London in 2018), Olafur responds to major Climate Change conferences and reports.

[44][45] In November 2015, Olafur together with geologist Minik Rosing again transported twelve enormous blocks of ice from Greenland to Place du Panthéon in Paris.

[44] Timothy Morton lists Ice Watch as an example of how art can help humans understand their relationship with nonhumans amidst ecological crisis, arguing that it "seriously stretched or went beyond prefabricated concepts, in a friendly and simple, yet deep way".

[45] Commissioned by Mei and Allan Warburg for the Donum Estate winery in Sonoma, California, in 2019, the Vertical Panorama Pavilion is built to accommodate up to 12 guests and inspired by the history of circular calendars.

She argued that Moss wall "evokes Scandinavia more powerfully than Eliasson’s dozens of photographs of rivers, caves and other natural features of Iceland, which fill one room of the show.

[53] In 2014 it was announced that his work Kissing Earth, representing two globes, was to be placed in front of the newly built Rotterdam Centraal train station in the Netherlands.

She found some of the art (like the ice boulders from Greenland) didactic but still wrote, "Each piece conveys the strange extremes of Iceland with all the condensed power of a sonnet".

The exhibit included site-specific installations, large-scale immersive environments, freestanding sculpture, photography, and special commissions seen through a succession of interconnected rooms and corridors.

[61] Until July 2025, Open, held at the MOCA Geffen Contemporary, is Olafur's first major exhibition in Los Angeles which consists of installations of light and geometry including a large mirrored geodesic sphere.

[77][78] That same year, Olafur and Henning Larsen Architects were recipients of the Mies van der Rohe Award for their Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center in Reykjavik, Iceland.

The family had lived in a house designed by architect Andreas Lauritz Clemmensen[83] in Hellerup near Copenhagen,[6] but Olafur and Jensen are no longer married.