The main work in the artist’s show at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum, brings a whole new meaning to landscape art

Riverbed (2014) by Olafur Eliasson. Installation view. Photo by Anders Sune Berg, courtesy of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

You could say Olafur Eliasson was a landscape artist. Only, the term brings to mind a kind of painterly conservatism that doesn’t really fit in with the Danish artist’s work. Rather, Eliasson remakes landscapes as art. The artist is best known for his 2004 Weather Project, when he installed a kind of indoor sun in London’s Tate Modern, and 2008 New York City Waterfalls, which saw him and his team built four artificial waterfalls at points along NYC’s East River.

Though these works do play with the perception of the environment and landscape, Eliasson isn’t commonly regarded as a land artist, in the same way as, say, Robert Smithson and Richard Long are. Instead, most see his works as devices to renew our appreciation of the world around us....Continue Reading

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