The exhibition presents new and recent works by Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson, made over the past five years. For decades, Helgi Þorgils has been one of Iceland’s most prolific artists. From the beginning of his career in the mid-1970s, he has 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. While his primary emphasis has been on painting, he works across a range of media, including sculpture, drawing and watercolour, and is also active as a writer.

In Helgi Þorgils’s work, dreamlike reality meets reflections on human existence and the natural world, with the two appearing as an indivisible whole. The artist’s visual language is figurative and narrative, composed of countless symbols. In recent years, the figures in Helgi Þorgils’s work have shifted from refined, white and almost sexless bodies – seemingly floating in a state of timelessness – towards greater physicality. They appear in ambiguous yet familiar settings, where Icelandic nature, birds, marine animals, religious and symbolic elements are woven together into a poetic whole. 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.

Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson (b. 1953) studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts from 1971-1976 before continuing his studies at De Vrije Academie in The Hague and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He 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. He was among the founders of the Living Art Museum in 1978 and for many years has run the exhibition space Gangurinn in his home.