Olafur Eliasson | Your reversed Berlin sphere, 2016

For HOT MESS, Olafur Eliasson is exhibiting Your Reversed Berlin Sphere, a sculpture composed of color-effect filter glass and a C-print.


The print depicts the city of Berlin as seen by the artist from his studio. To produce this illusory artwork the image is then duplicated and made into a smaller, spherical version placed in a circular form at the center of the original image. This inverted image thus completes the cityscape, which would otherwise be obstructed. The inclusion of color-effect filter glass leads to hues of yellow, blue, pink, purple and orange to appear within the artwork, reflecting different colors depending on the time of day and the position of the viewer. Additional variations in transparency are produced where the glass acts as a mirror, allowing the viewer to catch their own reflection within the complex glas arrangement.

Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967 in Copenhagen) works with sculpture, painting, photography, film, installation, and digital media. His works continuously explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Eliasson is internationally renowned for installations that challenge the way we perceive and co-create our environments. Since the mid-1990s, he has realised numerous major exhibitions around the world. The weather project (2003), an enormous artificial sun shrouded by mist, in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, London, was seen by more than two million people. For his project Ice Watch, Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing brought free-floating icebergs from a fjord outside Nuuk, Greenland, to public squares in European cities (Copenhagen, 2014; Paris, 2015; and London, 2018) to raise awareness of the climate crisis. Located in Berlin, Studio Olafur Eliasson comprises a large team of craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians.