Best known for his giant sun at Tate Modern, artist Olafur Eliasson is also passionate about food – chiefly, feeding hungry assistants at his vast Berlin studio. Marina O’Loughlin pulls up a pew
On my way to lunch with Olafur Eliasson at his Berlin studio, I bump into him outside the lift. “Good to meet you,” he beams. “We only usually get strange art people here. It’s so exciting to meet someone from the real world.” Blimey, what kind of wonderland have I stumbled into where a food critic passes as coming from the real world?
This handsome, brick building – a former brewery and chocolate factory in the Prenzlauer Berg district – is indeed a wonderland: four storeys of fevered creativity. As the lift opens on each floor, it’s like curtains raising on to a series of vivid stages: glimpses of artworks and libraries and intent, happy-looking people – artists and film-makers, architects and archivists, more than 90 of them, doing who knows what mystical things. The archivists are silent and absorbed; up on the top floor, artists in a high-ceilinged room heady with paint fumes are friendly and larky.
The idea was to pay my team back – it’s a degree of respect
There was that story about Anish Kapoor patenting a colour – black! That day, the kitchen used squid ink in the bread
Normally, we touch the world with our outsides, but with eating, we turn ourselves inside out
Related: Environmental art is on the rise – with a little help from Leonardo DiCaprio
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