Her work – a collaboration with Brazilian artist Eli Sudbrack and the French Christoph Hamaide Pierson – currently fills the windows of The Modern, the restaurant in New York's MoMA, facing onto 53. Commissioned especially for this location, the work fills several large windows – 8.5 x 4 m – with bright, iridescent colours that seem to bubble up under the glass. In fact, the effect is produced by a swirling mass of coloured artificial hair, highlighted by neon lights. The three artists were exhibiting together at the Deitch Projects Project in Long Island when they were approached by MoMA representatives who wanted the work in place for the Garden Party in June, one of the highlights of MoMA's calendar each year. The installation will remain in place until December.

Hair, artificial and real, has become almost a trademark material for Hrafnhildur. Two major installations at the Reykjavík Art Museum, in 2004 and again in 2006, brought this New York-based artist to the attention of a wider  Icelandic audience though in fact she has kept in close contact with the Icelandic scene and exhibited regularly in smaller galleries and in the Living Art Museum. Her next project in Iceland will be a major show in the Reykjavík Art Museum, collaborating with the Icelandic Love Corporation and other artists. In New York, she has taken part in several shows at Deitch Projects and, most recently, was one of the Icelanders showing at Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea this summer. International audiences, though perhaps unaware of her name and wider production, will know her work through Björk who used hair sculptures by Hrafnhildur for the art for her album Medúlla.

Educated at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts and in New York’s School of Visual Arts, Hrafnhildur has gradually built up an impressive résumé that reflects her taste for collaboration and group work. Hrafnhildur is now taking this even farther by setting up, along with her husband Michael Jurewicz, the Arnardóttir Jurewicz Art Foundation in an old chateau in Poland. The aim of the foundation is to foster cooperation between Icelandic and Polish artists and the first group of Icelanders – organized by the well-known artist-run Kling & Bang Gallery in Reykjavík – went there this summer to kick the project off.