Thursday June 4th at 6 p.m., we invite you to the opening of the exhibitions Great World by Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson and May Show Signs of Minor Defects by Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson.
In the exhibition Great World, dreamlike reality meets reflections on human existence and the natural world, with the two appearing as an indivisible whole. Helgi Þorgils’s visual language is figurative and narrative, composed of countless symbols. Figures appear in ambiguous yet familiar settings, where Icelandic nature, birds, marine animals, religious and symbolic elements are woven together in a poetic manner. At once delicate and powerful, the imagery reaches beyond earthbound reality. A great world where narrative and feeling work together, as beauty hovers at the threshold between the perceptible and the imagined.
Curated by Aldís Arnardóttir.
For decades, Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson has been one of Iceland’s most prolific artists. From the beginning of his career in the mid-1970s, he attracted attention for an innovative and highly personal narrative approach that has earned him a distinctive place in Icelandic art and recognition on the international stage. Over the course of his long career, his visual language has been in constant development, with human existence at its centre. Helgi Þorgils has exhibited widely since 1974, including as Iceland’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and at prominent museums and exhibition spaces in Europe and the United States.
Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson has long worked with found photographs and other material detached from its original context. We encounter couples posing together, a shoreline, a bare Christmas tree. The categories are familiar, but the coordinates are gone. What is so moving is not only the melancholy of lost images like these, but what their condition exposes. What binds the works in the exhibition together is their shared insistence that context is material, as meaning emerges through displacement and framing.
Curated by Daría Sól Andrews.
The exhibition is supported by Norske Billedkunstnere, Norsk Fotografisk Fond and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson (b. 1977) is an Icelandic artist based in Oslo, Norway. His practice spans photography, sculpture, publishing and curated projects. Jóhannsson often explores authorship, documentation and the social role of images through books, exhibitions and printed matter. His work examines the relationship between everyday life, the art object and exhibition contexts, frequently combining different media and materials within a single body of work. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig from 2003 to 2009. Since 2012, he has run the independent small press Multinational Enterprises.
Free entry – see you at Hafnarborg.
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