“Sunset door”

Olafur Eliasson is one of the most important artists of this century. Well known for his large-scale installations, he also produces sculptures and photographs. He has participated in exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Modern Art, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Netherlands), and the International Festival of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil. His works are in important public and private collections, such as the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Deste Foundation (Athens), and the Tate Modern (London).

He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen from 1989 to 1995, but in 1993 he spent a year in Cologne (Germany) and then moved to Berlin. For some years now, the artist has owned Studio Olafur Eliasson, a research laboratory with around 30 people from different backgrounds such as architects, engineers and designers. Here, sculptures, installations of various sizes are designed, tested and built, as well as conceptual projects developed.

Olafur's works are usually based on simple materials such as water and light. In them, the artist reflects a lot on nature and culture. They are designed to explore our senses and question our habits and automatic reactions based on subjective experiences. In the installation Seu caminho sentido, held at Sesc Pompeia in 2011/2012, the visitor entered a large closed room filled with white smoke and walked towards the illuminated area, located at the back of the room, experiencing different gradations of brightness.

However, the elements used have their existence and transformation controlled, manipulated, and in some cases even forged, without, however, being hidden. The artist leaves the artifices and their mechanisms revealed, in order to make the construction of reality explicit. An attitude that makes us reflect more critically on the experience we have.

His work includes works that involve not only the world of visual arts, but also design, architecture and cities, such as the 2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, created in partnership with Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen. In "The New York City Waterfalls" (2008), for example, four large waterfalls are created from scaffolding along the East River, and in Green River, a project first carried out in Bremen (Germany) and later in other cities between 1998 and 2001, in which a non-toxic substance used by biologists to monitor water currents was added to river water, turning it phosphorescent green.

For Olafur Eliasson and Anna Engberg-Pedersen (editor of Studio Olafur Eliasson: An Encyclopedia and contributor to Studio Olafur Eliasson): “Art is a language. In itself, it does not communicate anything. What it conveys is what gives it meaning. Art is not exclusive and does not delimit the boundaries of a closed sphere. It goes beyond. And when artistic language imagines space and the users of space as its central agents, it can easily interact with architecture, science and design. It can also raise political, ecological, aesthetic and ethical questions – any domain of reality is a possible collaborator and offers a terrain to explore. This multiplicity of domains with which art intersects is what makes it so complex and stimulating.”1

1. Source: ELIASSON, Olafur & URSPRUNG, Philip. Studio Olafur Eliasson. Taschen, Cologne, Germany, 2008.