38 Facts About Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson 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", in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London.

Olafur Eliasson was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009 to 2014 and has been an adjunct professor at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design in Addis Ababa since 2014.

Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Elias Hjorleifsson and Ingibjorg Olafsdottir.

Olafur Eliasson's parents had emigrated to Copenhagen from Iceland in 1966, his father to find work as a cook and his mother as a seamstress.

Olafur Eliasson lived with his mother and his stepfather, a stockbroker.

At 15, Olafur Eliasson had his first solo show where he exhibited landscape drawings and gouaches at a small alternative gallery in Denmark.

However, Olafur Eliasson considered his "break-dancing" during the mid-1980s to be his first artworks.

Olafur Eliasson studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1989 to 1995.

In 1990, when he was awarded a travel budget by the Royal Danish Academy, Olafur Eliasson 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.

Olafur Eliasson received his degree from the academy in 1995, after having moved in 1993 to Cologne for a year, and then to Berlin, where he has since maintained a studio.

Olafur Eliasson is influenced by Bruce Nauman, as well as James Turrell and Robert Irwin.

Early works by Olafur Eliasson consist of oscillating electric fans hanging from the ceiling.

Olafur Eliasson used humidifiers to create a fine mist in the air via a mixture of sugar and water, as well as a semicircular disc made up of hundreds of monochromatic lamps which radiated yellow light.

Olafur Eliasson has been developing various experiments with atmospheric density in exhibition spaces.

Olafur Eliasson's later installation Din blinde passager, commissioned by the Arken Museum of Modern Art, is a 90-metre-long tunnel.

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

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

Olafur Eliasson first achieved international prominence with Green river, which initially made Stockholm pedestrians concerned that the city's water had been tainted.

Olafur Eliasson was commissioned by BMW in 2007 to create the sixteenth art car for the BMW Art Car Project.

Olafur Eliasson designed the facade of Harpa, Reykjavik's new concert hall and conference centre which was completed in 2011.

In close collaboration with his studio team and Henning Larsen Architects, the designers of the building, Olafur Eliasson has designed a unique facade consisting of large quasi bricks, a stackable twelve sided module in steel and glass.

Olafur Eliasson's idea was chosen in 2007 among five other proposals in a bidding process by a panel of judges.

In November 2013, at the Falling Walls Conference, Olafur Eliasson presented with Ai Weiwei, connected via web from Beijing, their collaboration Moon, an open digital platform that allows users to draw on enormous replica of the moon via their web browser.

The installation was repeated in 2018, when Olafur Eliasson divided a total of thirty ice-blocks between two locations in London: 24 blocks at the banks of the Tate Modern museum, and 6 blocks before the Bloomberg headquarters.

In 2007, Olafur Eliasson developed the stage design for Phaedra, an opera production at the Berlin State Opera.

Olafur Eliasson praised the artist as avoiding excessive political activism and Matthew Barney's "implications of mystical portent".

Olafur Eliasson found some of the art didactic but still wrote, "Each piece conveys the strange extremes of Iceland with all the condensed power of a sonnet".

Olafur Eliasson had his first solo show was with Nicolaus Schafhausen in Cologne in 1993, before moving to Berlin in 1994.

In 1996, Olafur Eliasson had his first show in the United States at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.

Olafur Eliasson has had major solo exhibitions at, among others, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, and ZKM, Karlsruhe ; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt ; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo ; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa ; the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin and the Langen Foundation, Museum Insel Hombroich, Neuss.

Olafur Eliasson has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Biennial and the Istanbul Biennial, Venice Biennale, and the Carnegie International, Palace of Versailles, The Parliament of Possibilities at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art.

In 2004, Olafur Eliasson won the Nykredit Architecture Prize and the Eckersberg Medal for painting.

In 2010, Olafur Eliasson was the recipient of a Quadriga award.

Olafur Eliasson returned his award one year later after it was revealed that Vladimir Putin would be recognized in 2011.

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

In 2014, Olafur Eliasson was the recipient of the $100,000 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT.

In 2003, Olafur Eliasson married the Danish art historian Marianne Krogh Jensen, whom he met when she curated the Danish Pavilion for the 1997 Sao Paulo Art Biennial.

Olafur Eliasson has a younger half-sister named Victoria Eliasdottir who is a chef.