The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of a photograph of the 2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Kjetil Thorsen. This marks the gallery's eighth commissioned pavilion, a platform for temporary projects by architects and designers who have never before completed a building in the UK.

Born in Copenhagen in 1967, Eliasson studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art from 1989 until 1995. From the beginning of his practice, the artist has imported natural elements into man-made spaces. He installed a geyser in front of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, brought swampy smells and soil to the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and toyed with sunlight in Your Sun Machine, first displayed at Los Angeles' Marc Foxx Gallery. His work is shown around the globe, and he is currently represented by Tanya Bonakdar in New York and neugerriemschneider in Berlin.

With his increasingly complex installations, Eliasson has become a critical and popular favorite. For the Tate Modern's Unilever Series commission in 2003, he brought the weather inside the museum's Turbine Hall. With misted sugar water, an enormous disk of yellow light, and a mirrored ceiling, the artist turned many museumgoers into impromptu sun-worshippers. In 2005, Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale and, with the help of architect David Adjaye, constructed Your Black Horizon. Within a black room, a continuous line of light emitted an entire day's light spectrum every 15 minutes and tricked the viewer's eye into creating a secondary horizon. For the Serpentine Gallery project, Eliasson teamed up with Thorsen, co-founder of Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta. The two have collaborated previously, notably on the National Opera House in Oslo, and together forge a provocative fusion of art and architecture. (LM)

Eliasson's first full-scale survey in the US, Take Your Time, is on view at SFMOMA through February 24.