Tracing the decades of artistic exchange at the National Gallery of Iceland
Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Untitled, 1993 LÍ-7295.
REYKJAVÍK.—
The collection of the National Gallery of Iceland contains many outstanding works of art—some of them significant gifts from artists—representing a period of meaningful artistic exchange between Icelandic and international artists who shared theoretical and aesthetic concerns. Shown here, alongside important loans from Reykjavík-based collections, the works in this exhibition call attention to a remarkable chapter in the development of art in Iceland, marked by the convergence of artists associated with the land art, conceptual art, and minimalist movements from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Inevitably, these movements took on their own texture in Iceland, with the country’s geography and local materials shaping the work. While the exhibition is by no means a comprehensive survey, the relationships between the works convey formal and poetic resonances.
With Icelandair’s (formerly Iceland Airlines) introduction of stopover flights between Europe and the US, beginning in the 1960s, opportunities emerged for artists to travel more easily to Iceland to tour the countryside and to meet with artists in the local scene. The confluence of Icelandic and international artists in the mid-1960s sparked conversations within the avant-garde SÚM group, a loose association of artists working in a variety of artistic styles, from New Realism, Neo‑Dada, Fluxus, and Pop, to later, conceptual art. Two of SÚM’s progenitors, Hreinn Friðfinnsson (1943–2024) and Kristján Guðmundsson (1941–2025), are shown here with works that playfully engage with the idea of the horizon line.
In 1979, Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson founded the Corridor gallery, an artist-run exhibition space that aimed to present the work of international contemporary artists in Iceland. This important home gallery invited an exceptionally diverse group of artists to Iceland, many of whom would develop long-lasting relationships with the country. The British filmmaker and artist Adam Barker-Mill (b. 1940) first showed in Iceland in 1988, at the Corridor Gallery. The work shown here is something of hybrid of a functional lamp and art object. The work has two lights: one that projects backward onto the wall and another that faces forward. The brightness of each light can be independently controlled to alter the relationship between the reflected light on the wall and the ‘eye’ on the sculpture.
Alan Johnston (b. 1945) first came to Iceland in 1987, at Helgi Þorgils’ invitation. The following year, Johnston had an exhibition at Nýló, the Living Art Museum, which began exhibiting works by contemporary Icelandic and international artists in 1980. In turn, Johnston would invite Icelandic artists to exhibitions abroad, including at his project gallery, Sleeper, in Edinburgh. Johnston’s delicate, rhythmic pencil marks invite a slowing of attention and appreciation of the work’s relationship to its environment.
Some foreign artists came to Iceland of their own volition, including the so-called “British walking artists.” Hamish Fulton first visited Iceland with his compatriot, Roger Ackling (1947–2014), in 1979. They traveled to the Westfjords to walk and make artworks. Ackling drew with sunlight on wood; the dark lines on otherwise unassuming pieces were made by directing sunlight through a magnifying glass to scorch the surface. During that first trip to Iceland, he collected driftwood, and explored the ways in which sunlight in the northern latitudes lacked the intensity found in more southerly locations.
Hamish Fulton (b. 1946) subsequently made other long, solitary walks in the country. His work focuses upon his experience of traversing a landscape, often using language to describe the sounds, sights, and his own internal response to the vastness of space and the sense of isolation. His approach establishes a connection between the viewer and the artist while also expressing the impossibility of fully conveying experience.
Walking was also central to the practice of British land artist Richard Long (1945), who came to Iceland in the 1970s. He often traveled to remote areas, making simple interventions in the landscape, such as arranging a stack of rocks in a line that he would then photograph and display along with explanatory text in a gallery. In 1988, Long was invited to exhibit at the Living Art Museum alongside Donald Judd and Kristján Guðmundsson. The work Sea Lava Circles, 1988, was acquired by Judd following the exhibition and is now permanently installed at his Chinati Foundation in Texas. Both this work and Sea Lava Circle, 1988, shown here, were made of stones smoothed by the sea and collected from the Reykjanes Peninsula.
The American conceptual artist and writer Roni Horn (b. 1957) first came to Iceland in 1975, when she was still a college student. Inspired by the experience of solitude in the wilderness of Iceland’s austere landscapes, she returned to Iceland many times over the course of decades, eventually becoming a citizen. In her ongoing investigations in her art and writing, Horn’s reflections on the fragility of Iceland’s nature have had a profound influence on Icelandic artists and others. One such project was a series of visual editorials entitled Iceland’s Difference, 2002, published in the newpaper Morgunblaðið, and distributed nationwide.
In 1990, the American artist Richard Serra (1938–2024) was invited to Iceland to participate in the Reykjavík Art Festival. He was commissioned to create a land artwork on Viðey island, entitled Áfangar, for which he sourced naturally occurring basalt columns, eighteen of which are arranged along the coastline in pairs. Visitors experience the sculpture by traversing the littoral, observing how the columns’ relationships to one another and the contours of the terrain shift with one’s vantage point. It is a significant work in the artist’s oeuvre in that, rather than drawing attention to themselves, the sculptures frame the viewer’s perspectives of the surrounding landscape. Serra was profoundly affected by Iceland’s landscapes, so much so that he had his gallery send oil stick and paper for the extensive drawings he made of the site, some of which he gifted to the National Gallery. He went on to develop new printing techniques that enabled the heavy application of ink on paper, capturing the weight and volume of the stones and mountains he encountered in Iceland.
From 1992–1997, the businessman and art collector Pétur Arason, together with the artist Ingólfur Arnarsson, operated an exhibition space known as Second Floor at the home of Pétur and Ragna Róbertsdóttir at Laugavegur 37. There, they invited many important international contemporary artists to exhibit. It was through these channels that works by international artists began to be acquired by private collectors and Icelandic museums. Arason and Róbertsdóttir later establish Safn Contemporary Art Collection on three floors in the same building, which they operated in collaboration with the City of Reykjavík. The impact of these venues in providing space for Icelandic and international artists, and the close relationships that were forged in the process, cannot be underestimated. Among the many international artists shown in the gallery who came to Iceland were the sound artist Max Neuhaus (1939–2009), the conceptual artist Richard Tuttle (b.1941), and the painter Alan Uglow (1941–2011), among many others. Carl Andre (1935–2024), Donald Judd (1928–1994), and Lawrence Weiner (1942–2021), each of whom was familiar with the Icelandic Sagas, also traveled to Iceland and became long-standing friends of the founders of the galleries.
Both Ragna Róbertsdóttir (b. 1945) and Ingólfur Arnarsson are major figures in Iceland’s minimalist movement. Róbertsdóttir’s spare forms, often created from natural materials such as stones, lava pumice, and shells, and from manufactured materials such as glass, allude to ice and can be seen as a poetic reimaging of Iceland’s landscape.
The National Gallery of Iceland is fortunate to have several significant works by the artist in its holdings. The wall mural Glacier, 2025, installed in the museum’s stairwell, was created for this exhibition and will be on view through the end of this year.
Ingólfur Arnarsson (b. 1956) often used concrete upon which a gesso surface is applied with the addition of color. The materiality and highly specific installation conditions create a tension between the architecture of its location and the traditions of painting. When the work shown here was exhibited at the Nordic House in Reykjavík, accompanied by other similar paintings. Donald Judd visited the exhibition and purchased two of the paintings for his own collection. Judd invited Arnarsson to come to his Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, to make work. The time Arnarsson spent there culminated in an exhibition that Judd acquired and installed permanently at the Foundation.
Another significant venue for showcasing the work of contemporary Icelandic and international artists, with a particular focus on conceptual art, is i8 Gallery, founded in 1995 by Edda Jónsdóttir and her son, Börkur Arnarson. It was through this connection that the artist Finnbogi Pétursson (b. 1959) met international gallerists, including Michael Sturm, who invited him to show in Stuttgart in 1999, alongside works by Ragna Róbertsdóttir and Kristján Guðmundsson. The sound work shown here, 2.5 Hz Delta, 1999, acquired after that exhibition, is based on the interaction of two sine tones, 57.5 Hz and 60 Hz, which generate a resonance or interference tone—a third, emergent frequency. Delta waves fall within the frequency range of 0.5 to 4 Hz and are associated with deep sleep, a state in which the human brain operates at its slowest rhythms. In 2.5 Hz Delta, this physiological reference is approached indirectly, through acoustic interference rather than direct representation, allowing the work to exist at the threshold between perception, time, and bodily awareness.
Ívar Valgarðsson (b. 1954) first exhibited Twig, 1988, at the National Gallery of Iceland in 1988, as part of an exhibition titled Five Young Artists. As the title suggests, the sculpture refers to a part of a tree, though its concrete rendering creates a tension between natural and manufactured materials. Further confounding this tension is the surface texture, which carries the impression of work from the sculpture‘s casting.
Although Georg Guðni (1961–2011) was principally known as a painter of representational landscapes that draw the viewer into the spatial realm of the receding horizon, he created a body of work in the late 1980s and early 1990s that bordered on abstraction. Undergirded by a grid structure, the built-up layers of paint criss-crossing the canvas in Untitled, 1990, suggest the diffuse nature of light and atmosphere. In an entirely different vein, the conceptual artist Birgir Andrésson (1955–2007) used literal descriptions of landscapes to conjure images in the mind’s eye in his series Icelandic Nature (1998).
Although Jóhann Eyfells (1923–2019) spent the majority of his life in the United States, his work is nonetheless suggestive of the processes and temporal magnitude that formed the Icelandic landscape. The work in the exhibition, Circular Linguisticity IV, 1989, combines a formal sculptural structure with solidified flows of once-molten aluminium.
This exhibition speaks of place and people, and those things that hold them together. The particularities of Iceland have long attracted a diverse array of artists. Affinities of Form seeks to understand the artistic and interpersonal dynamics of a group of artists drawn together by shared philosophical concerns engaged with Iceland’s landscape and culture.
This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Pétur Arason (1944–2023), a visionary art collector and a catalyst for artist conversations and collaborations.
