Birgir Andrésson died last October, only fifty-five years old. Yet he must be counted among the most productive Icelandic artists of his time. His career in art spans only three decades but in that time he held dozens of one-man exhibitions and more groups shows than probably even he could remember. His oeuvre was remarkably consistent – a clear and detailed working out of his subjects and formal approach. His work was always at once innovative and accessible, to-the-point and even humorous, like an unexpected simile in a poem that suddenly throws even the most familiar subject into a new light. Birgir was also well-respected for his art. Only a year before his death the National Gallery in Iceland mounted a retrospective exhibtion of his work and already in 1995 he was sent to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale. Llast year he was nominated for the Icelandic Visual Arts Award and would undoubtedly have won that award sometime in the near future, had he lived. Birgir belonged to the avant-garde of his generation but his art was unique.

The first of Birgir's exhibitions I wrote about was in Gallery 11 in Reykjavík in 1994, entitled Newly Found Lands. He exhibited several plaster relief maps of Iceland with its familiar outline but with alterations to the interior landscape: Suddenly a chain of mountains had appeared on the flat expanse of the southern coast and the mountainous Western Fjords had become flat. I have always felt that this small exhibition showed especially well how Birigir approached his subjects. With the simplest of gestures, everything was transformed. The Scottish artist Mark Boyle once said that the most effective way to transform one's environment was to change one's perspective on it. That was certainly borne out in Birgir's work.

Drawing and composition came easily to him, already as a teenager. He was also a well-organised worker and had the patience to work meticulously and present his work to its best advantage. For many who entered art school in the 1970s, such talents became a hinderance rather than an asset as conceptual art and performances came to dominate and it was considered almost passé to draw well or even to care about such things. Birgir had no such prejudices and he integrated new methods and approaches into his own with apparent ease.

He had a good eye for the formal and visual aspects of his environment but was less concerned about art-historical precedents or references. The history he was attracted to was that peculiarly Icelandic manifestation that is gleaned primarily form oral transmission and enshrined in sayings, character descriptions, nicknames and linguistic trivia. The visual horizon of this history seldom intersects with the established history of art, being rather read from common images and household objects, all the insignificant details that each generation leaves behind. Birgir patiently analysed and documented numerous aspects of this nearly-lost cultural history. He exhibited drawings of archaeological sites and old photographs of long-dead tramps and eccentrics, he catalogued what he called the 'Icelandic Colours', redrew old postage stamps and had the Icelandic flag knitted in undyed wool, the colours of the sheep themselves replacing the normal red, white and blue. His subject matter was thus most often particularly Icelandic – or at least had reference to specifically 'national' subjects – but his treatment concentrated on form and structure. He revealed the simple formal constructions and colour schemes underlying the emotion-laden imagery, showing how its effect might have more to do with the power of visual presentation in general than with the supposed content. In this way he dissolved the symbols that have been used to explain the Icelanders' national identy to themselves and found in instead a method he could use to expand and deepen his own reasearch.

Birgir knew full well that he was a good artist, but he was very humble when it came to his research and academic context which he mined for his works. In the introduction to his 1991 book on turn-of-the-century tramps he wrote: "It must be emphasised that this is not a historical treatment but only a feeble attempt by an artist to throw a weak light on the varied background from which so-called Icelandic culture has grown." More often than not, though, this weak light showed up new and unexpected features of the subject, new perspectives, new colours. There was nothing accidental about his approach and many of his subjects crop up again and again in his works. Each new exhibition was like a reasearch report and it was a delight to follow and share in his wide-ranging studies.

One of these subjects was Icelandic postage stamps from the beginning of the twentieth century, showing waterfalls and geysirs and the Maid of the Mountains – the established feminine incarnation of the country and its people – with surrounding ornamentation that was meant to evoke the golden age of the medieval Icelandic commonwealth, carefully divided into sections on the field, some filled with decorations, others with lettering. Beginning already in 1985, Birgir copied and redrew these stamps, dissolving them into a pointillistic blur, first in back and white drawings and later in multi-cloloured paintings. In the paintings this has the effect of making the images almost unreadable, much like the hero-worshipping nostalgia itself that originally inspired them. The paintings became symbols of historical distance and the difficulties faced by anyone who seeks to recapture times passed.

In 1986 Birgir took this theme even further, exhibiting a series of cabinets with many doors and compartments that carefully recreated the formal construction of the postage stamps so that each section had its own door. Formally, these cabinets are exact recreations of the forms on the stamps but without any of their symbolic content, the images of unique natural wonders, the decorations and the lettering. In these works, as in so much of Birgir's art, national themes are treated with minimalist methods that are inherently nationless or international, mean nothing and effectively reject all symbolic content. The content in these 'national' construction was hidden behind closed doors and, of course, if one opened the door, the cupboard behind it proved bare.

This chilly humour, the revealing ironic persepctive, was the sharpest weapon in Birgir's arsenal. In his art he used it to undermine established preconceptions about history and the uncritical rehashing of clichés about our origins and the symbols of national identity. Like most Western nations, we Icelanders have inherited those symbols and the worldview they reflect form the nineteenth century. The Maid of the Mountains is a sister to Brittania, the French Marianne and Germania – the swarm of feminine deities that arose at that time to symbolise the unbreakable bond between the people and the land. Their presentation and the formal constructions which Brigir investigated reflect the neoclassical ideologies of the time. The same formal constructions can of course be found not only in Iceland but in all neighbouring countries – they stem from the same source and can be traced back to antiquity for that matter. The most cherised national symbols prove to be anything but, and this is what Birgir hgihlighted in his works, turning mundane clichés and local jokes into art.

The 'Icelandic Colours' are one of the strangest and most contradictory subjects in Birgir's art and, like so many of his themes, turn up again and again in different contexts. In his text-paintings the text appears on a solid field of colour which is identified in a caption in the corner: "Colours: Icelandic Pantone 173, Icelandic Pantone 533." To begin with this was perhaps just characteristic irony, making fun of pseudo-national trends in interior decoration. Later, however, these colours later became a sort of signature that Birgir could use to put his mark on almost any subject he chose. They came to function much like the pre-made stamps the Fluxus artists created and used to connect their eclectic assemblages and notes. But Birgir's Icelandic Colours also reflected his genuine interest and thorough research into colours and their sigificance in every context. Two years ago Birgir asked me to write about blue for a book he had planned, telling me to take my time as he knew it would be a difficult task. The deadline came much too soon.

An Icelandic version of this essay appeared in the peroiodical Herðubreið in November 2007.