A brush with... Olafur Eliasson

A brush with... Olafur Eliasson

From A brush with... by The Art Newspaper

December 17, 2025 · 1h 15m · Season 31 · Episode 4

About this episode

Olafur Eliasson discusses his artistic influences and the impact of climate change on his work.

Olafur Eliasson talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen and grew up between Denmark and Iceland, where his parents were from. His installations, sculptures, photographs and paintings, among other projects, reflect a profound concern with human presence in nature and how we perceive and interact with the world around us. His works can be deceptively simple or enormously complex, but often share a rigorous and reductive geometry, which may conversely produce expansive and multifarious perceptual, sensory and embodied effects. Eliasson has stated that “the spectator is the central issue”, a long-established aspect of conceptual and environmental practices, but for him it is important that the viewer not only completes the work, but is also transformed by it. This subjective and individual revelation is, he hopes, allied to a sense of collective experience, what he calls a “we-ness”, that often alerts his audience to wider cultural and social issues including the climate catastrophe. Indeed, environment, in…

People in this episode

Host: Ben Luke

Guest: Olafur Eliasson

Topics covered

  • artistic influences
  • climate change
  • perception
  • human presence in nature
  • collective experience

Keywords

  • Olafur Eliasson
  • art
  • climate catastrophe
  • perception
  • human interaction
  • collective experience
  • Copenhagen

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Copenhagen, Denmark, Iceland

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