On this day 40 year ago, June 1st 1083, husband and wife Sverrir Magnússon and Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir gifted the town of Hafnarfjörður with their house at Strandgata 34, including their extensive art collection, establishing Hafnarborg – the Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art.

For decades, the couple had run the Hafnarfjörður Pharmacy in the building that now houses the museum, which was also their home, but together they had amassed a large art collection and their wish was that both the house and the collection would pass onto the community, in the hopes of fostering the cultural landscape of Hafnarfjörður and providing a space for art exhibitions, concerts and related events.

To commemorate this, we invite guests to take a peak behind the scenes at the museum tomorrow, Friday evening, as we work on the installation of our new exhibitions and offer insights into the process of making an exhibition.

So feel free to join us for birthday cake, coffee and light drinks.

Everyone welcome.

On May 2nd, the last Midday Concert of the season took place in Hafnarborg, but the concert series has now been part of the Hafnarborg programme for twenty years.

We thank Valgerður Guðnadóttir for singing for us and our guests and we also thank pianist Antonía Hevesi for her work and dedication, but Antonía has been the artistic direction of the concert series from its inception.

We would also like to thank everyone who has performed at the concerts this season, as well as those who have made the concert series what it is for the past couple of decades, enriching the culture scene in Hafnarfjörður, by offering a free midday concert for all lovers of music.

We look forward to welcoming you at Hafnarborg in autumn when we begin the new season of Midday Concerts.

The Art Council of Hafnarborg has selected Elitist Landscape, as the autumn exhibition of the year 2023, from proposals that were submitted at the end of last year, but the winning proposal was submitted by curators Eva Lín Vilhjálmsdóttir and Odda Júlía Snorradóttir.

The participating artists will be announced at a later date.

This will be the thirteenth exhibition in Hafnarborg’s Autumn Exhibition Series, where the objective is to collaborate with different curators, who get the chance to submit their own proposals, allowing new voices be heard. The Director and Art Council of Hafnarborg then review the submissions and select the winning proposal each year.

We are proud to present the programme of the coming season of the Hafnarborg Midday Concert Series, in winter to spring 2023, but the concert series first started in 2003 and is therefore in its 20th year of operation. The first Midday Concert of the year is set to take place on February 7th at 12 p.m. To start the season, Erla Björg Káradóttir, soprano, will perform, accompanied by Antonía Hevesi, the artistic director of the concert series, on piano.

The programme of the Midday Concerts, until spring, is as follows:

February 7th
Erla Björg Káradóttir, soprano

March 7th
Bernadett Hegyi, soprano

April 4th
Sigríður Ósk Kristjánsdóttir, mezzosoprano

May 2nd
Valgerður Guðnadóttir, mezzosoprano

The Midday Concerts normally take place on the first Tuesday of each month during the wintertime. The concerts start promptly at noon and last for approximately half an hour. The doors open at 11:30 a.m. and the concerts are open to all, as long as seating is available. Entry is free.

Please note that the programme is subject to change.

Last year, Hafnarborg received a generous donation of massive concrete sculptures made by the artist Sóley Eiríksdóttir (1957-1994), born and raised in Hafnarfjörður. The works add to the museum’s existing collection of works by the artist, spanning Sóley’s short but dynamic career.

The works were bestowed upon the museum by Brynja Jónsdóttir, the daughter of Sóley and artist Jón Axel Björnsson, who made the formal donation last autumn, from which time an exhibition of Sóley’s works has been in preparation at Hafnarborg.

The exhibition will feature the recently acquired artworks, as well as works that were already part of the Hafnarborg Collection, belong to the collections of other museums or private collectors. Clay was Sóley’s medium of choice, but early on she mostly worked within the pottery tradition. Later, however, her imagery took on a life of its own in large, three-dimensional works, made from concrete.

The title of the exhibition is Amuse, curated by Aldís Arnardóttir and Aðalheiður Valgeirsdóttir.

Sóley Eiríksdóttir studied metalworking at the Technical College of Hafnarfjörður for a year after finishing her studies at the Flensborg Secondary School. In 1975, she then enrolled in the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, first at the Department of Teaching before ultimately graduating from the Department of Pottery in 1981. Sóley exhibited widely in her short career, for example at the Reykjavík Art Museum, Hafnarborg, Gallerí Langbrók and the ASÍ Art Museum, as well as abroad, in the United States, Finland, Luxembourg, Canada and Germany.

This year’s Globe of Goodwill, Sphere with Mark, by Karin Sander is now available at the museum shop. Each year, the Globe is sold as a limited edition, but last year the Globe sold out. All proceeds go to benefit children and young people with disabilities.

A red brushstroke floats in the tree, a painterly gesture on a fragile glass sphere, the colour glows and moves, acting as a marker of the ending year.

Karen Sander applies a single brushstroke to the transparent Globe of Goodwill as a clear painterly gesture. The thick impasto sits on the smooth, convex surface of the glass, visible three-dimensionally from all sides, including its concave side. The brushstroke’s end is wispy, revealing the viscosity of the colour while also telling of a gesture that is both cautious and energetic. The chosen colour stands out luminously from its surroundings, thereby becoming a sign of attentiveness and self reflection. Sphere with Mark thus becomes a mobile painting that constantly changes, as it responds to the environment, integrated in the painting itself.

Karin Sander (b. 1957) lives and works in Berlin and Zurich, but she has been connected to the Icelandic art scene since the early 1990s. Her artistic practice questions given situations and spaces in relation to their structural, social and historical contexts, making them visible in different ways using a range of media. Her works have been presented in solo exhibitions and festivals worldwide and belong to public collections around the world. Since 2007 she has held a professorship for architecture and art at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich. Together with Philip Ursprung, she will represent Switzerland at the 18th International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2023.

The Globe of Goodwill will be sold at the museum shop from December 8th until December 23rd, or while it remains in stock. 

Gunnar Örn Gunnarsson (1946-2008) moved with his family to Kambur in South Iceland in 1986. There, he had a spacious studio in an old storehouse, which he transformed and used as his workspace for over two decades, but the space made it possible for him to work on a bigger scale than before. From 1998, Gunnar Örn also ran an international gallery on site, called Gallerí Kambur, now an artist residency.

This summer, Hafnarborg presents a retrospective of Gunnar Örn’s career, titled In the Depths of Your Own Awareness. In connection with the exhibition, Gunnar Örn’s family will open the artist’s studio at Kambur all Saturdays in August, from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Kambur is located by the lake Vestra Gíslholtsvatn, midway between the towns Selfoss and Hella, on route 284, diverging from the Ring Road shortly after one crosses the river Þjórsá heading eastwards (driving from the capital takes a little less than an hour and a half).

Click on the map to view it as a bigger image.

Welcome to the studio for a coffee and a chat.

At noon on June 10th, Rósa Guðbjartsdóttir, Mayor of Hafnarfjörður, unveiled a new mural by artist Juan on the wall of Strandgata 4, which has been decorated with various wall paintings in the last years. In the first place, Juan contacted the municipality of Hafnarfjörður to find out if the town had a building which might be fit for this purpose, but Juan has lately caught people’s attention for his murals in the public space all around Iceland.

Members of the Culture and Tourism Committee of Hafnarfjörður were intrigued by Juan’s idea and asked him to submit a proposal for a mural on Strandgata, but the resulting sketch was a collage of monuments and public artworks in the town of Hafnarfjörður, including select works under the care of Hafnarborg. Subsequently, representatives of the town contacted the artists or the families of the artists to ask for their permission to make use of the works in this manner, which they all kindly granted, and so thanks go to everyone who made this work possible.

The mural depicts the following monuments and public artworks:
· Worship by Ásmundur Sveinsson
· Shelter for Winds by Barbara Tieaho
· The Golden Gate by Eliza Thoenen-Steinle
· Monument to the First Lutheran Church in Iceland by Hartmut Wolf, also known as Lupus
· Troll by Páll Guðmundsson of Húsafell
· Hafnarfjörður Variations by Sebastian
· Bad Connection by Sonja Renard
· Untitled work by Sólveig Baldursdóttir
· A Hundred Years of Solitude and an untitled work by Sverrir Ólafsson
· The Watch by Timo Solis
· Sailing by Þorkell Gunnar Guðmundsson

The mural also features a QR code which leads directly to Hafnarborg’s website on public artworks in Hafnarfjörður, which will hopefully increase awareness of and people’s interest in this remarkable collection, which can be visited at all hours of the day. In the hopes of improving public health, Hafnarborg the encourages both residents and visitors of Hafnarfjörður to take a walk around town – seek out the works, take a little break and let art be a force of healing.

Hafnarborg’s website on public artworks can be found here.

All of us at Hafnarborg would like to congratulate Elfa Björk Jónsdóttir on being named the Artist of the Year of Art Without Borders, but Elfa Björk will have a solo exhibition at Hafnarborg this autumn in connection with the festival.

Elfa Björk Jónsdóttir is a talented artist whose style is based in abstraction, where she brings together formalist and figurative imagery in a lively manner, drawing inspiration from the environment, nature books or from art history.

Art Without Borders 2022 will take place from October 15th until October 30th.

Pictured with Elfa Björk are Jóhanna Ásgeirsdóttir, artistic director of the festival, and Aldís Arnardóttir, Director of Hafnarborg.