Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1967, where he studied at the Danish Academy of Art from 1989 to 1995. He retains a strong connection to Iceland, his parents’ homeland, whose dramatic landscape and climate has been an important source of inspiration.
Central to Eliasson’s work is a consideration of how we perceive and experience the world. Often he fabricates natural looking phenomena (such as sunlight, flowing water or mist) in man-made environments such as an art gallery. These fabricated phenomena directly engage his audience’s senses and prompt reflections on how we experience things. Eliasson has described this effect as the ability ‘to see yourself seeing’.
The cubic structural evolution project 2004 is a participatory art work in which viewers contribute to the construction of a Lego world. It is a work in which Eliasson encourages a very direct level of engagement. Viewers are able to actively guide their experience of the work as it organically takes shape over the duration of its installation.