An artist who has been able to spectacularly manipulate viewers’ perceptual and phenomenological experience of the world, Olafur Eliasson has staged a number of enormously popular installations. His work often makes use of scale to completely envelop viewers in fantastical worlds. In his youth, Eliasson studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and traveled to New York, Cologne, and Berlin, experiencing some of the world’s greatest metropolises. His work since that time has focused on viewers’ experience of the interplay between light, architectural space, and vision. Eliasson often collaborates with various other technicians, craftsmen, and designers for his projects, allowing him to execute grand feats with detailed precision. Eliasson’s installation for the 2005 Venice Biennale, Your Black Horizon, consisted of a pavilion, constructed to be completely dark except for one continuous break in the wall, which ran around the structure’s perimeter. The thin line of light acted as a drawing of space and illusionistically made the building’s upper half appear to be floating independently.

Eliasson has received enormous critical acclaim, particularly for his work in the Danish Pavillion at the 50th Venice Biennale and his Weather Project installation at the Tate Modern in 2003, for which he created an artificial sun within the space of the museum. He has shown widely throughout the world since the mid-1990s, with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art,  the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, SFMoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland.