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artists.

Olafur Eliasson
  • OLAFUR ELIASSON.

    Works described by the artist as "experimental set-ups" span photography, installation, sculpture and film. Eliasson is an excellent example of an artist who is branching out.

     

    Eliasson’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. His practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects and interventions in civic space. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world.

     

    His output is prolific and attracts interest because of the unique scope and variety of his projects. He has done stuff you've heard of even if you're not interested in art, and his ideas about human thought and behaviour have relevance well beyond the gallery gift shop.

     

    Having attended climate change conferences with an Icelandic president, and collaborated with world-class scientists, as well as corporations, he mixes art with science, politics and commerce. He scorns the notion of the artist as a visionary genius. His interest in social contracts and public space is key to his work.

     

    Eliasson has a penchant for landscape and the environment, architecture and utopian philosophies. For him, art is a means of turning thought into action, and Eliasson’s works are moving more and more towards political and environmental action.

     

    His constructions, at once eccentric and highly geometric, use multicolored washes, focused projections of light, mirrors, and elements. The artist’s use of unconventional tools, such as mirrors, lights and water, is a means by which he can challenge the boundaries of space. He prompts an intensive engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.

     

    Located at the centre of his artistic practice is the question of our relationship to reality in all its social, urban, technological and emotional aspects. Particularly interested in scientists and engineers, and far from worrying that the arts might get left behind with technology moving as fast as it does, he is broadening the possibilities of what digital technology can do for the arts, and vice versa. Technological tools are there to serve his artistic vision.

     

    His Berlin studio today numbers nearly ninety craftsmen, specialised technicians, architects, archivists, administrators, and cooks.

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