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Copenhague (Denmark), 1967

Educated at the Königlich Dänische Kunstakademi (Royal Academy of Art) in Copenhagen, between 1989 and 1995, from his beginnings, this Finnish artist's creative concerns have been focused on the study of sensory perception, the laws of physics and natural conditions. He currently lives and works in Berlin, although he spends long periods in Finland every year. In 2003, he represented Denmark at the Venice Biennial.

With his production, Olafur Eliasson has continually questioned the idea of nature held by man, as well as the mechanisms employed by science for recording and observing it. His work addresses the relations between nature and technology, as well as things organic and industrial, and it is mentally and emotionally interrelated with the elements used. Throughout his career, the Danish artist has developed two independent yet intimately related sets of work: installation projects and photographic records.

In his installations, the elements dealt with always belong to the realm of nature: sunlight, vapours, air and water currents, or plants shape scenes that are occasionally indirectly based on subatomic or astrophysical research and experimentation. The Dane aims to demonstrate how throughout history and also during our day, the different models of perception proclaimed from objective reasoning provoke changes in the social and ideological structures, affecting our perception of the world.

Through this type of devices for the perception of reality, Eliasson creates, with a great economy of means, connections and interrelations between reality itself, our perception of it, and the representation that eventually arises. In Your Sun Machine from 1997, one of his installations produced at the Kunthaus Bregenz (Austria), the artist left the enormous exhibition space empty, opening a circular hole in the ceiling. Every morning, the sun entered through the hole, first creating elliptic forms, then circular ones. The sun's mark on the floors and walls, as well as the movement it described throughout the day, were the this piece's only focus of attention.

In his photographic work, the artist acts as a documenter of the natural landscape, paying special attention to the geophysical characteristics of the Nordic regions. In this way, his photographs present repetitive series on specific themes -glaciers, rivers, islands, caves, lakes, waterfalls- that appear mounted alongside each other, forming monographic compositions. Eliasson thus aims to capture the peculiarities of the environment. He portrays nature from strange angles to demonstrate how sensorial experience is sometimes very estranged from the great formulas of physics and mathematics apparently regulating the world order. A. S.