A Retrospective of the work of Icelandic artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson at London's prestigious Serpentine Gallery:
'... playful and affecting, and gives the world meaning'
These are the words of art critic Adrian Serle of the Guardian, on Tuesday July 17, Iceland's National Day: 'Stories lead to other stories, a chain reaching back into the past. This aspect of Fridfinnsson's art I like very much. It is playful and affecting, and gives the world meaning.'
He was writing about the large retrospective exhibition of works by Icelandic artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson in the Serpentine Gallery in London which opened that day and runs to 2 September.
Born in 1943, Hreinn was as a leading figure on the Icelandic avant-garde after founding the group SÚM with three other artists in Reykjavik in 1965. He moved to Amsterdam in the early 1970s and has been living and working there ever since, exhibiting around the world and making frequent visits to Iceland where he also exhibits regularily. Hreinn Friðfinnsson has had solo exhibitions at: the National Gallery of Iceland, 1993; 45th Venice Biennale, 1993; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Amsterdam, 1992. His work has also been featured in group shows including the Carnegie Art Award, 2000 and Sleeping Beauty–Art Now, Scandinavia Today, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1983.
The exhibition in the Serpentine Gallery is the most extensive and visble presentation of his art to date and audience figures show that his art has captured the imagination of the art-going public in London. The critics have also been enthusiastic. Philip Hensher, columnist of the Independent, wrote: 'Why is this so magical? I think it's because, unlike so many conceptual artists, Fridfinnsson doesn't seem concerned to direct our attention towards himself. About his life we learn little. He is interested, above all, in the world, and the purity of his interest is mesmerizing, even in its simplicity.'
In the Observer, critic Laura Cumming ponders the exhibition and comes as close as anyone has to describing the subtle attraction of Hreinn Friðfinnsson's aetherial art:
This is the kind of art that could, and probably does, irritate those with more robust tastes. But slightness need not imply lack of strength. A single shoe on the floor next to a mirror that naturally makes a pair of itself may not seem much more than a jeu d'esprit at first. But when you stumble across its doppelganger, its eerie replica, in another part of the gallery the effect is peculiarly unnerving; there is deja vu, of course, which is something mirrors know all about, but also the sensation of moving through a looking-glass world.
Fridfinnsson's sensibility is so delicate that the results can sometimes be winsome. I'm thinking of the glass vessels reflected in mirrors that play beautifully with air and light and hints of water but can't help embodying good taste too. But what raises his work above many contemporaries is the clarity of its insights.
Fridfinnsson has a poet's instinct for the memories that haunt our minds - places once seen, never to be revisited; wind in the ears and brine in the eyes; friendships unaccountably mislaid. He hits upon the simplest of means to evoke them, and the slighter the piece, it seems, the greater the scale of emotion.
LIST Icelandic Art News. Page last updated 8 August 2007. Texts and images copyright © by the authors. For inquiries and contact information see about us.
