HREINN FRIDFINNSSON – ECHOES AND REFLECTIONS
2015-03-02Friðfinnsson is considered by many the father of Icelandic conceptual art. As a reaction to the Abstract Expressionism of the 1960’s Friðfinnsson returned to the extraordinary qualities of the Icelandic topography and atmosphere that had traditionally been represented in landscape painting. His focus was on the most ephemeral and fleeting qualities of the world around him: light, reflection, wind, water, the passing of time. He also embraced other subjects of transient nature; for years he has collected the secrets of strangers, re-enacted unlikely myths, made artworks of borrowed materials (a sculpture of his neighbor’s door, photographs of his cousin’s horses), appropriated the wares of industrious spiders, saved and pressed Autumn leaves picked up in the early 1980’s. Friðfinnsson’s response to these inscrutable subjects developed into works characterized by a lyrical, stark poetry, an exquisite lightness of hand and an often self-diminishing humor.
In the exhibition Friðfinnssonn returns to his mythical House Project – a project based on the story of an old eccentric Icelander who intended to built a house inside out. In 1974 Friðfinnsson built the house based on the story in a remote area of the Icelandic volcanic tundra. Inversed, the wallpaper, curtains and framed pictures hanging on the outside, the house thereby contained the whole world, except itself. Since 1974 Friðfinnsson has returned to the work and developed new chapters in the life of the house thereby maintaining the mythology around it and adding new layers.
Opposite – Illustration, 2015
Exhibition runs through to April 2nd, 2015
Galerie Nordenhake Stockholm
Hudiksvallsgatan 8
SE-113 30 Stockholm
Sweden
