Aros Acquires Olafur Eliasson's Glowing Sphere 'Presence' in Long-Term Deal

By Daniel Okafor

Aros Aarhus Art Museum in eastern Denmark will acquire Olafur Eliasson's Presence (2025), a vast glowing yellow sphere that appears to hover in space. The purchase anchors a new long-term partnership between the Danish-Icelandic artist and the museum, called "Shared Futures".

The deal is more than a single acquisition. It bundles an exhibition, an outdoor installation, a public library, a research post and one crowd-pleasing sun.

What does the partnership include?

• Acquisition: Presence (2025), the hovering yellow sphere
• Exhibition: Thin Ice, a solo show opening autumn 2027
• Outdoor work: a new site-specific version of Waterfall (2004) on Aros's Art Square from 9 October next year
• Library: a publicly accessible collection of books on Eliasson's production, created by Studio Olafur Eliasson
• Research: a dedicated postdoctoral position with Aarhus University

A museum statement describes Thin Ice as presenting "key works from recent decades alongside new projects reflecting Eliasson's growing engagement with the climate, ecology, and humanity's relationship with its surroundings".

Aros already knows the artist's work from the inside. Its rooftop carries Your Rainbow Panorama (2011), Eliasson's rainbow walkway, which has become the museum's signature.

What does Eliasson say?

"Aros has supported my work in Denmark for many years, so it felt natural to make my online archive and library available there," Eliasson says in a statement. "The ambition is to show that museums can offer depth and focus for engaging with an artist's practice in a more detailed, granular way."

That is a quiet pitch against the blockbuster model: fewer selfies, more scholarship. Whether crowds treat a library as a destination remains to be seen.

Who brokered the deal?

Rebecca Matthews, Aros's director since 2022, says the partnership traces back to a rained-off photoshoot. "I first met Olafur Eliasson when I was chief executive of the European Capital of Culture in 2017, when he created an extraordinary stage design for the performance Tree of Codes," Matthews tells The Art Newspaper. "We were supposed to have our photograph taken together, but it was pouring with rain, so we ended up standing in a colonnade, talking. I remember thinking: If I ever get to lead a museum, he will be the first person I call."

She called. He answered with a sphere, a waterfall and a postdoc.

Eliasson appeared on The Art Newspaper podcast A brush with… with Ben Luke in December 2025. Luke wrote: "His works can be deceptively simple or enormously complex, but often share a rigorous and reductive geometry, which may conversely produce expansive and multifarious perceptual, sensory and embodied effects."

The first public test arrives on 9 October next year, when the new Waterfall hits the Art Square, with Thin Ice following in autumn 2027.