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Tate Modern is hosting a comprehensive survey of the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson

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Words by Sophie Tolhurst

Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life
11 July 2019 – 5 January 2020
Tate Modern

Tate Modern is hosting a comprehensive survey of the Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson, covering the many different themes his work has explored since the early Nineties. The works range from earlier projects such as Moss Wall (1994), made with lichen native to Eliasson’s homeland Iceland, to more recent experiments with colour, light and geometry, such as Your Spiral View (2002) and Your Uncertain Shadow (Colour) from 2010, where Eliasson plays with perception and participation to engender a feeling of ‘seeing yourself sensing’.

For the recent Ice Watch he imported real glacial ice from Greenland to the open space outside Tate Modern, while architectural projects including Fjordenhus, an office completed in Denmark last year, take the artist’s practice into the built environment. A number of Eliasson’s social initiatives will also be featured within the space, such as the Little Sun project, which provides solar-powered lamps and chargers to communities without electricity, and Green Light: an artistic workshop, previously hosted by a number of other arts institutions, which brings together members of the public with asylum seekers and refugees to construct ‘green light lamps’.

Extending beyond the gallery walls, and making viewers conscious of their own physical and mental real-time experience of the artwork, Eliasson continues to confuse the boundaries of his artistic practice.