Thursday June 4th at 6 p.m., we invite you to the opening of the exhibitions Great World by Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson and Verso/Recto 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.
In the exhibition, Sveinn Fannar Jóhannsson presents photographs found on the street, detached from their original context: couples posing together, a shoreline, a bare Christmas tree. The categories are familiar, but the coordinates are gone. The photographs appear translucent, as the recto, or front, faintly shines through. The verso, or back, of each image is presented alongside a sound work drawn from the artist’s long-running conversations with clairvoyants. The work explores how meaning depends on framing, context, and projection.
Curated by Daría Sól Andrews.
The exhibition is supported by Norske Billedkunstnere, Norsk Fotografisk Fond and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
What binds these works together is a shared insistence that context is material. Over the years, Jóhannsson has worked with found images and displaced materials, exploring how meaning emerges through framing, displacement, and interpretation. Through these works, viewers become more aware of their own habits of looking: how quickly they search for the original source, the stable narrative, and the authoritative voice.
Free entry – see you at Hafnarborg.
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