Olafur Eliasson’s (born 1967 in Copenhagen/DK, lives in Berlin/Germany) photographs from his ongoing series of Icelandic landscapes correspond to the other works by the Icelandic-Danish artist. These reflect and refer to the perception of nature and its constituent elements such as water, earth, moss, light, temperature, fog, fire, ice, wind and color. In inventive installations combining and recreating the effects of natural phenomena in architectural and technological settings, Eliasson draws attention to various qualities of the experience of nature in a cultural context. Beauty, one of Eliasson’s early installations from 1993, presents a rainbow created by illuminating water coming through a perforated hosepipe. Other installations of his recreate the experience of wind, rain, fog, or colors and light, or as in his work Double Sunset from 1999, the illusion of a sunset. The weather, not only as a natural, but also as a cultural and socially discussed phenomenon, is the subject of The Weather Project, a commission for the The Unilever Series at the Tate Modern in London in 2004.

Olafur Eliasson believes that his notion of space and consciousness is derived from his Scandinavian background, and that the role of nature in his life if he were, for example, from New York, would be totally different. In this context, his numerous photographic series of Icelandic landscapes can be seen as a pictorial background for Eliasson’s artistic concept. They document the formations and characteristics of a rough and varied archaic nature which includes areas of volcanic earth, natural geysers, waterfalls, stones and moss, hills and mountains, whilst simultaneously displaying traces of our culture, such as electricity masts and cables in natural surroundings. In an interview about his photographs of Iceland he compared them to sketches which “document natural phenomena more or less manipulatively.”

Reference: Olafur Eliasson. Monograph, London/New York: Phaidon Publishers, 2002