Beyond the discretion lies an intensity he cannot entirely disguise.

But then you take in his eyes, huge and heavy-lidded behind smeary glasses. Eliasson would rather die than refer to himself as “famous” – he prefers the word “exposed” – and thanks to this you wonder about his ego, which seems somehow to have gone missing. Among curators and other art world people, Eliasson is known both for his politeness and modesty, and when you meet him, his straightforwardness and grace – I’ve never heard someone sound so sincere when accepting compliments – strike you immediately as all of a piece with his nubby Scandinavian clothes, his understated gestures, his instinctively democratic manner. Even so, the artist himself manages to slip in unnoticed, his entourage consisting only of his small daughter and her friend. The place is quiet: only a few of the young staff are around, and all of them wear headphones. Psychedelic sublime: Olafur Eliasson’s sun, properly titled The Weather Project, at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2003. In this covetable realm, I stand for a moment on an island-shaped rug whose lurid green just about matches my mood. At the bottom, where my tour ends, is Eliasson’s lair, a tiled room that brings to mind a Victorian swimming pool, and which is filled with mid-century furniture and all manner of oddities, his collection of lightbulbs and a dashing cocktail cabinet among them. At the top of the building is the office canteen, a kitchen so modish it has been visited by such famous cooks as Alice Waters and Rene Redzepi, and will shortly publish its own recipe book the staff eat its mostly vegetarian offerings together, and must each add their names to the washing-up rota. While Eliasson calls it a “reality-producing machine”, a term born of his conviction that, far from being rarefied and utopian, the projects it turns out are deeply involved with the world in which they’re made, it seems more like a kind of factory to me, albeit one devoted to the manufacture of ideas rather than of things.Įighty people are employed in its cavernous spaces, working on everything from the archive to the production of catalogues, the staging of international exhibitions to the design of full-scale architectural projects. Artists haven’t been associated with garrets for a while now, but even by 21st-century standards this place is something else. O lafur Eliasson, the Icelandic-Danish artist who will probably always be best known for the vast sun he induced to rise inside the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2003, works in Berlin in a building that once housed a brewery.

Tree of codes