Rúrí is an ambitious artist with an even more ambitious vision. Her extensive curriculum vitae speaks to how professionally prolific she has been over the past three decades, and it forecasts only greater recognition of her work and further success to come. But her art itself speaks volumes, too, of her important position within the art world in Iceland and internationally: it reveals a critical and compassionate concern for the troubled relationship between humans and the natural environment, as well as the strife amongst peoples worldwide. Working in a wide range of media, Rúrí presents her consternation for threatened nature and human discord intertwined with and alongside her more conceptual interests in time, relativity, and ephemerality.

Rúrí’s career, however, is far from ephemeral. Born in Reykjavik in 1951, where she continues to live and work, Rúrí has become one of Iceland’s most prominent contemporary artists. She has held residencies in various locales throughout Scandinavia, Western Europe, the Balkans, China, and Canada; her exhibitions and public works have been shown and collected from Paris to Tokyo, New York to Beijing. In addition to exhibitions at the Gerduberg Cultural Center in Reykjavik and the Reykjavik Art Museum, in 2007 Rúrí will hold solo exhibitions in Chicago and Athens, as well as presenting her work and performance in Frankfurt and Venice.

Though first gaining notoriety in Iceland in 1974 when she demolished a gold-painted Mercedes Benz with a sledgehammer in downtown Reykjavik, and though she had long since established herself through solo and group exhibitions worldwide, Rúrí’s grand entrance on the international stage was her participation in the 2003 Venice Biennale. Her interactive, multimedia installation Archive—Endangered Waters was comprised of 52 photographs of Icelandic waterfalls threatened by building of dams and hydroelectric plants, as well as audio recordings of each fall. Visitors to the pavilion could move the photos, which were developed on transparent film, framed like biological specimens between two panes of glass, and all encased in a large steel frame “archive.” Sliding each photograph into view would initiate the corresponding sound recording that captured the unique sound of each respective waterfall. In such a piece, Rúrí simultaneously presents the raw beauty and sublime of the environment while asking viewers to reflect critically on their physical relationship with her art and the nature it portrays, as well as underscoring the power humans have to alter the natural world.

Other works by Rúrí, too, engage a critique of contemporary political conflict or other aspects of environmental devastation. Her major exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum in 1998 entitled Paradise?—When? coincided with the 50th anniversary of the signing of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Rúrí’s installation included some 100,000 index cards with intentionally incomplete information about individual victims of war; metal wall plates with silkscreened texts referring to numerous armed conflicts and humanitarian conventions; video footage of destruction and chaos in Bosnia-Herzegovina; and a number of computers containing more detailed information about the war victims represented by the index cards, and Internet access to websites such as those of Amnesty International and the United Nations. Paradise?—When? is a poignant example of Rúrí’s ability to confront viewers through artistic means with some of the darker, more disquieting aspects of human nature. Rúrí reminds each viewer of the individual’s connectedness with a greater social consciousness, and she suggests we take increased responsibility as members of a globalized and globalizing society.

But Rúrí’s oeuvre is not unifacetedly, overtly and forcefully political; many of her works possess a refined elegance and reflect more subtle musings on conceptual themes. Perhaps Rúrí is best known—or at least, most visible—in Iceland for her sculpture at the Leifur Eiriksson International Terminal at the airport in Keflavik. Simply called Rainbow, the 24-meter-high sculpture is indeed a colorful effigy of a gracefully arched rainbow rising from the ground into the sky, capturing the ephemeral phenomenon of refracted spectral light and transforming it into a permanent greeting to all who fly into or out of Iceland. Rainbow is beautiful, yes; and yet, to those who consider it deeply, it presents a keen but subdued inquiry into the essence of materiality, time, and the fleeting moments and certain atmospheric conditions under which we see “real” rainbows. And perhaps that is the greatest power of Rúrí’s art: the ability to please the eye, challenge our perceptions, and penetrate into our awareness of what it means to be an individual being bound within the interconnectedness of the human and non-human worlds.