Olafur Eliasson

Join Olafur Eliasson on his journey into the depths of the Icelandic bedrock. Like an endoscopic examination, Eliasson’s pictures explore the winding veins of the rock, its minerals, stalactites and stalagmites, and caves. Exploring the shifting boundaries between nature and culture is what Olafur Eliasson is all about. He is often inspired by nature and natural phenomena from the Icelandic landscape.

The cave as a location features as an element throughout the entire history of art, from the cave paintings of southern France to Leonardo da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks”, and on to the numerous depictions of Italian cave settings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early 1990s, Eliasson started to take photographs of the natural world on his annual holidays to his childhood home of Iceland. The photographs were taken while walking, sailing, climbing or flying and span everything from traditional landscapes to close-ups of moss and glacial ice, usually shown together in large series. One of his most extensive projects, “The Inner Cave Series” is a single work formed of 36 pictures. Thus he takes the subject from merely being documentation of a landscape to becoming a contemporary, conceptual work of art which discusses environmental change and people’s attitude to nature.

Eliasson’s fascination with mountains is clear in many of his photographic works. Several of his works depict the exterior of the mountain but his photographs also delve into its interior with waterfalls, geysers and volcanoes. In “The Inner Cave Series” he reveals the secrets of the rock, an inaccessible interior that is mysterious but also surprisingly beautiful.

Olafur Eliasson is one of the best-known contemporary artists in the world. His works have been shown in virtually all the major art institutions worldwide, including Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and he has created site-specific works in New York and at Versailles.