Olafur Eliasson in "Berlin" - Season 9 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

Olafur Eliasson’s Approach to Art

Olafur Eliasson sees art as more than an object: its importance lies in how people experience it and what that experience makes them question. Asking “What am I looking at?” can prompt viewers to examine how they see and understand the world. For Eliasson, art can encourage self-evaluation and change how people think.

His work draws on familiar physical materials and conditions, including water, light, temperature, and ice. Growing up in Denmark and spending time in Iceland helped shape his interest in these elements—not as a romantic contrast to culture, but as tools for exploring space and human experience. He has used waterfalls, for example, to bring a human sense of scale and presence to vast urban spaces and create shared moments of looking.

Approaches and Projects

• Create immersive, sensory experiences: Use natural elements to invite people to engage with their surroundings and one another.
• Explore public space: Test how people encounter art outside prescribed settings such as museums. The Weather Project raised questions about whether an artwork could operate both indoors and outdoors.
• Experiment without requiring a finished artwork: The studio tries out ideas that may not develop into artworks if they prove less interesting than expected.
• Treat design as an experience: A proposed bridge was approached as an artwork that would create a playful space, not merely connect two sides. People would cross between small islands.
• Make climate change tangible: Ice Watch brought twelve blocks of Greenlandic ice to Copenhagen in 2014 and Paris in 2015. The project aimed to give people an immediate, physical experience of an issue that can otherwise feel abstract.
• Connect art with practical advocacy: Little Sun, developed with an engineer, explored how solar energy could be experienced and used. It was conceived both as an artwork and as a tool for promoting renewable energy, with potential practical value for communities.
• Work collaboratively across disciplines: Eliasson’s Berlin studio grew from a small group to around ninety people, organized broadly into crafts, research, and architecture teams. Collaboration and shared purpose are central to its work.
• View the studio as a way to examine the world: Eliasson describes the studio as an amplifier for ideas and a place to study the world beyond its walls. He argues that art can contribute to real-world solutions and act as a “civic muscle.”

Creators and Contributors

Olafur Eliasson, Caroline Eggel, Anna Engberg-Pedersen, Sebastian Behmann, and Felix Hallwachs are featured. An unnamed engineer also contributed to the development of Little Sun.