SAN FRANCISCO—For the past 15 years, the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has made art that engages perceptual, ecological, and temporal themes by harnessing such abundant and ephemeral elements as water, light, and mist in installations that typically unfold in public spaces. His best-known work, 2003's The Weather Project, a dramatic optical illusion suggesting the atmosphere of sun at twilight, was created with a few simple materials, including a bank of lights and a mirrored ceiling. The work was installed at London’s Tate Modern, where it reportedly attracted two million visitors, many of them repeat customers, who sprawled out on the public floor and pondered their reflections on the ceiling as they basked in the glow. With its fantastic success, The Weather Project nudged the artist’s work to a new level of public awareness, success, and scrutiny.

This fall, Eliasson’s first major U.S. survey exhibition, “Take your time,” opens at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). The show features more than a dozen installations, photographs, and sculptures arranged in a series of interconnected rooms and corridors (including a new piece that turns the museum’s skylight bridge into the descriptively titled One-way colour tunnel), and it offers an opportunity to engage the artist’s participatory oeuvre in a more sustained manner, through its immersive presentation of linked installations. Meanwhile, “Your tempo,” a concurrent presentation of Eliasson’s recent contribution to the BMW Art Car program—a hydrogen race car encased in ice and housed in an industrial-strength freezer—points to his interests in the environment and the physical experience of perception, as well as a complicated relationship to commerce (the artist also created a major, globally visible 2006 commission for Louis Vuitton when he filled the holiday windows of 350 Vuitton branches with his work Eye See You).

Eliasson spoke to ARTINFO about these concerns, as well as his indebtedness to the California Light and Space artists, during a check-in visit to supervise the labor-intensive installation of his show at SFMOMA.

Olafur, the catalog for this exhibition includes a dialogue between you and Robert Irwin. Is it significant for you that this exhibition is organized in California, where the Light and Space movement emerged?

The West Coast artists of that time had a degree of generosity that has always inspired me. It was not necessarily in their distinct formal agenda or language, but in the polyphony of tolerances embedded in their work. On the other hand, their East Coast contemporaries, like Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt—and I know I’m generalizing—had a more rigorous relationship to right and wrong and established a stronger discourse of criticism.

Irwin still inspires me today. His work was never really embraced by public institutions, because they weren’t ready for its spatial language. His art is often impossible [to handle], so it’s found in few public collections, while almost all include Judd’s more adaptable pieces.

It’s also rare for a museum to take on the challenge of showing the kind of work I do. Normally, I make a single, large, site-specific piece, which is difficult to sell. And no museum wants [a work involving] water on the fifth floor, right on top of a Picasso show. I feel very fortunate to have a large exhibition in a museum like SFMOMA. They really did a lot to make this show work.

One could argue, though, that because The Weather Project was so well attended, you’ve been identified as someone who can activate a museum space in a popular, almost spectacular way. Irwin’s work is much subtler.

I think Irwin’s work is quite “spectacular,” though not in the Disney sort of way the word is usually taken today. And I hope that’s not the case with my work, either. I come from Scandinavia, where people have strong faith in the state and the idea of the public system. We pay a ton of money in taxes, which is not always comfortable, but it represents a fundamental belief in a certain type of democracy. I grew up with a history of civic participation, with cultural institutions having a high degree of ethical responsibility in terms of sharing knowledge and fostering critical debate.