Olafur Eliasson
Copenhagen (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.

Horizon Series, 2002

This series presents forty colour photographs in panoramic format -22.5 x 104.5 cm.- which address one of the reoccurring elements of our lives and in the history of art: the line of the horizon. The images unfold mounted alongside one another, giving rise to a sort of photographic panoptic about the geomorphology of the Nordic territory. Eliasson detains the wild beauty of the places portrayed by way of the photographic gesture, the compositions are not meant to embody expressive efforts, but merely to capture nature just as its is, in continual evolution.
The artist, as Caspar David Friedrich did before him, during the age of Romanticism, sets his eyes on nature, but he does not show it as a monumental environment that is terrifying to man, but instead simply tries to offer a natural and, to a certain extent, subjective portrait of the Nordic landscape. His compositions are the result of a simple dialectic between the artist, the technology of the photographic camera and the environment around him, the landscape. Consequently, through his lens, we can observe a certain melancholic view regarding the elements represented.
The photographic technique affords Olafur Eliasson an opportunity to approach nature as a personal experience. His photographic images are generally captured during his trips to Iceland, and they clearly differ from his installations, which appear to arise from long-laboured reflections and meditations in his studio. Eliasson himself has commented that for him the experience of the artistic work is more important than the final piece, expressing a stance in which the creative process in art is primary and the physical object stemming from that effort is secondary.
In this gigantic photographic installation, almost nine metres long, Eliasson acts as a geologist -as he had previously done in The Cave Series, 1998 and in The Glacier Series, 1999- for he is representing images of the Nordic lands with extraordinary meticulousness and precision. The spectator can therefore establish multiple relations with the images, letting him/herself be drawn into the methodical analysis of the landscape represented, placing her/himself in the unfathomable abyss between reality and photographic representation. A. S.