Olafur Eliasson: Where Art Design Meets The World Of Opera

Three chandeliers (2004) by Olafur Eliasson, adorn the lobby of The Royal Danish Opera House in Copenhagen.

"Olafur Eliasson (Icelandic: Ólafur Elíasson; born 1967) is a Danish-Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. In 1995 he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin, a laboratory for spatial research. Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London. Eliasson has engaged in a number of projects in public space, including the intervention Green river, carried out in various cities between 1998 and 2001; the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007, London, a temporary pavilion designed with the Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen; and The New York City Waterfalls, commissioned by Public Art Fund in 2008. Olafur Eliasson was born in Copenhagen in 1967 to Elías Hjörleifsson and Ingibjörg Olafsdottir.

Glasfassade Bühnenfenster (2005) at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich.

His parents had emigrated to Copenhagen from Iceland in 1966, he to find work as a cook, and she as a seamstress. He was 8 when his parents separated; he lived with his mother and his stepfather, a stockbroker. His father, then an artist, moved back to Iceland, where the Eliasson spent summers and holidays. At 15 he had his first solo show, exhibiting landscape drawings and gouaches at a small alternative gallery in Denmark. However, Eliasson considered his "break-dancing" during the mid-1980s to be his first artworks. With two school friends, he formed a group — they called themselves the Harlem Gun Crew — and they performed at clubs and dance halls for four years, eventually winning the Scandinavian championship. In 1987, Eliasson’s grandfather killed himself, in Copenhagen. The same year, Eliasson’s father, who had

Music Wall (2006) at the Alsion Concert Hall in Sønderborg, Denmark. (Photo by Adam Mørk)

remarried, was hospitalized for alcoholism. Olafur returned to Iceland to help care for his two-year-old half sister, Anna Viktoria, and he decided to apply to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied between 1989 and 1995. In 1990, when he was awarded a travel budget by the Royal Danish Academy, Eliasson went to New York where he started working as a studio assistant for artist Christian Eckhart in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and reading texts on phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. 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. First located in a three-story former train depot right next door to the Hamburger Bahnhof, the studio moved to a former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg in 2008. In 1996, Eliasson started working with Einar Thorsteinn, an architect and geometry expert 25 years his

Echo House (2007) for Manchester International Festival Opera House. (Photo by Joel Fildes)

senior as well as a former friend of Buckminster Fuller. The first piece they created called 8900054, was a stainless-steel dome 30 feet (9.1 m) wide and 7 feet (2.1 m) high, designed to be seen as if it were growing from the ground. Though the effect is an illusion, the mind has a hard time believing that the structure is not part of a much grander one developing from deep below the surface. Thorsteinn's knowledge of geometry and space has been integrated into Eliasson's artistic production, often seen in his geometric lamp works as well as his pavilions, tunnels and camera obscura projects. For many projects, the artist works collaboratively with specialists in various fields, among them the architects Thorsteinn and Sebastian Behmann (both of whom have been frequent collaborators), author Svend Åge Madsen (The Blind Pavilion), landscape

Olafur Eliasson created the production for Henze's opera Phaedra at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin (2007)

architect Gunther Vogt (The Mediated Motion), architecture theorist Cedric Price (Chaque matin je me sens différent, chaque soir je me sens le même), and architect Kjetil Thorsen (Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, 2007). Today, Studio Olafur Eliasson is a laboratory for spatial research that employs a team of c. 30 architects, engineers, craftsmen, and assistants who work together to conceptualize, test, engineer, and construct installations, sculptures, large-scale projects, and commissions. As professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Olafur Eliasson founded the Institute for Spatial Experiments (Institut für Raumexperimente, IfREX), which opened within his studio building in April 2009. Eliasson had his first solo show with Nicolaus Schafhausen in Cologne in 1993, before moving to Berlin in 1994. In 1996, Eliasson had his first show in the United States at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) organized Eliasson's first major survey in the United States Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, on view from 10 September 2007 to 24 February 2008. Curated by the director of

The Other Wall (2010) in the lobby at the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo.

the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Madeleine Grynsztejn (then Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at SFMOMA), in close collaboration with the artist, the major survey spanned the artist's career from 1993 and 2007. The exhibit included site-specific installations, large-scale immersive environments, freestanding sculpture, photography, and special commissions seen through a succession of interconnected rooms and corridors. The museum's skylight bridge was turned into an installation titled One-way colour tunnel. Following its San Francisco debut, the exhibit embarked on an international tour to the Museum of Modern Art, and P.S.1. Contemporary Art Center, New York, 2008; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, 2008–09; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2009; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2009–2010. He has also had major solo exhibitions at,

Glass brick façades (2011) of The Harpa Reykjavik Concert Hall home to The Icelandic Opera.

among others, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, and ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe (2001); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2004); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2006); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Ishikawa (2009); and Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2010). Eliasson has also appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial and the Istanbul Biennial (1997), Venice Biennale (1999, 2001 and 2005), and the Carnegie International (1999). The Spiral Pavilion, conceived in 1999 for the Venice Biennial and today on display at Kunsthalle Bielefeld, brought Olafur Eliasson the Benesse Prize by the Benesse Corporation. In 2004, Eliasson won the Nykredit Architecture Prize and the Eckersberg Medal for painting. The following year he was awarded the Prince Eugen Medal for sculpture and in 2006, the Crown Prince Couple's Culture Prize. In 2007, he

Artist Olafur Eliasson

was awarded the first Joan Miró Prize by the Joan Miró Foundation. In 2010, Eliasson was the recipient of a Quadriga award; he returned his award one year later after it was revealed that Vladimir Putin would be recognized in 2011. In October 2013, he was honored with the Goslarer Kaiserring. That same year, 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, Eliasson was the recipient of the $100,000 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); the prize is considered an investment in the recipient’s future creative work, rather than a prize for a particular project or lifetime of achievement. The awardee becomes an artist in residence at MIT, studying and teaching for a period of time. On the occasion of a state visit to Germany in June 2013, the President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, visited the Studio Eliasson in Berlin. Brazilian filmmaker Karim Ainouz's documentary piece, Domingo, shot from his encounter with Eliasson during the 17th Videobrasil Festival, had its world premiere at Rio International Film Festival in 2014, and will be released on DVD in 2015. Eliasson is married to Danish art historian Marianne Krogh Jensen, whom he met when she curated the Danish Pavilion for the 1997 São Paulo Art Biennial. They adopted both their son (in 2003) and their daughter (in 2006) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The family lives in a house designed by architect Andreas Lauritz Clemmensen in Hellerup near Copenhagen; Eliasson commutes to Berlin. Eliasson speaks Icelandic, Danish, German, and English." [Source, Source] See more select works of Olafur Eliasson after the jump.

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Rebecca Bottone (l) and Janis Kelly (r) in Prima Donna at the Manchester International Festival

You have have an opera, Prima Donna, that's about to open in New York.
Yeah, that’s premiering in February at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It's very, very exciting – it’s part of the New York City Opera season. The opera was supposed to be here years ago, and it had to kind of travel the world in order to return home. So it’s a homecoming of that work. Opera has always been kind of my ace in the hole. I was converted to the form when I was a teenager. So I always had that in the background. But I didn’t want to be a classic musician, necessarily. So I just sort of take those influences and infused them into my songwriting. But I knew, down the line, that I'd want to return back to that form, as sort of musical sacrifice for all the beauty that it’s given me over the years. I’ve hopefully done that with Prima Donna.

William Joyner and Janis Kelly

When did you know it was the right time to take on the opera? I'd been thinking of an idea for a long time. And I was actually expecting it to be a much later kind of conquest in my life. I thought maybe in my fifties or something. As it is with many theatrical endeavors, this story just fell in my lap – of the day in the life of an opera singer – and these characters just instantly, miraculously appeared in my imagination and needed to come to life. I think a lot of playwrights or opera writers – you’re sort of summoned by the work itself. It’s not really you that goes out looking for it. [Source]

(Photos: Clive Barda)