Olafur Eliasson is happy to talk about the weather. Over coffee at this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, the conversation moves quickly from pleasantries about the rain to the profound sociobiological effects of sunlight on the human body. The leap is not surprising. The Danish-Icelandic artist—long based in Berlin—has made the perception of natural phenomena the center of his practice for decades, illuminating social forces through the manipulation of natural ones, often on a grand scale.

His 2003 The Weather Project installation filled the Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall with an artificial sunset, enthralling the more than two million Vitamin D–starved Londoners and tourists who collectively experienced the work during its now-famous run. The spectacle turned Eliasson into a celebrity artist and the Tate’s large-scale installations into a must-visit thing.

“You don’t go into a museum to get away from the world. You go into a museum to see the world in higher definition. This is how I think of design as well.” —Olafur Eliasson, artist

With that history between them, it’s only fitting that the Tate Modern will open a career-spanning survey of the 52-year-old artist’s work this summer. The exhibition, titled Olafur Eliasson: In Real Life, runs July 11, 2019, to January 5, 2020. It will feature greatest hits from the artist’s oeuvre, though all but one of them will be seen in the United Kingdom for the first time.

A few months before the show opens, Eliasson is in Milan for another project, the launch of a pendant lamp he designed for Louis Poulsen. With the sci-fi-sounding name OE Quasi light, the glowing apparatus resembles a caged star or a long-sought item in a video game. Under its celestial glow, we spoke about lighting design, preparing for the upcoming retrospective, and the dangers of cultivating comfort.

Did preparing for the Tate Modern exhibition give you the opportunity to reflect on your body of work?

For me, art is always relative. Depending on the context and time in which you look at it, nothing is really constant. But there is a thread going through all of my work in which people—or people’s perception and experiences—have a key role. Even though I very often say my work is about nature, about light, about the environment, at the end of the day, my work is about people. Without people, I would not be an artist.

How is your design work similar to your art?

Making art that you can see in collections and museums is one thing, but design is a great opportunity to democratize access to my work and my ideology.

I’ve been interested in how art can both host your presence in a room and also allow you to take ownership of your presence, to make you not just consume the conditions in which you find yourself, but coproduce them. It is about more than making sure that you are just, should I say, comfortable?

How does your lamp do that?

Quality of life has to do with understanding atmospheric conditions. It’s about asking, “Is this noise making me feel stressed or at ease? Is the temperature, is the atmosphere, is the humidity, is the quality of the sound, the air?” My lamp, in this case, is an atmosphere machine or an atmosphere producer.

When you conceptualize a new work, are you already thinking about its emotional effect?

Well, I think about affect and experience a lot, but there is also an element of data or science. Affect or emotional contingency can never be separated from your moral compass or from your sense of responsibility. Otherwise, you have an escapist type of wellness—a contemplative, isolated bubble where you are disappearing into some sort of dreamy space and are relieved of your responsibilities. That might be a good stress reducer, but the success of a work lies in the balance between a strong contemplative quality and a responsibility to see the world with greater granularity.

If we forget science or forget data, there is a tendency to over-emotionalize things—and then you end up with something like Trump, which has no data and only emotion. It’s a little bit like with art. You don’t go into a museum to get away from the world. You go into a museum to see the world in higher definition. This is how I think of design as well. It is not about drifting or dreaming away; it is about taking a step closer to what you fundamentally need in your life.

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