Olafur Eliasson (Contemporary Artists (Phaidon))

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With images that suggest a modern-day Caspar David Friedrich, sculptor Eliasson recreates in elegant forms the extremes of the landscape and the atmospheric conditions of his native Iceland, resulting in a new kind of techno-Romanticism. Based in Berlin, Eliasson rebuilds in the gallery fragments of his faraway land: icebergs at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, "windmills" at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark. For Eliasson, immaterial sensations such as temperature, smell, taste, air and magnetic waves become sculptural elements when presented in an art context. A simple circular cut in the ceiling of a gallery in Los Angeles, for example, recreates the feeling of the weak sun in Iceland, and becomes a kind of giant sun-clock reminiscent of both Matta-Clark's architectural cut-outs and the oculus of the Pantheon. Eliasson has become a recurring favourite in recent Biennales; his beautiful, quiet works inspired by themes of nature, isolation and introspection have made him among the best known and most admired names. His work has been seen in nearly every important international survey of new art, among them "Cream", the Venice Biennale, 1999, the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale 1997, the Istanbul Biennale 1997, the Sydney Biennale 1998 and the Sao Paulo Biennale, 1997, to name only a few. In 2002 Eliasson is nominated for the Hugo Boss prize and will be featured in the Guggenheim Museum's short-list exhibition in New York.