Icelandic artists exhibited at New York's Scandinavia House

The exhibition ICELAND: Artists Respond to Place opened last Friday at the Scandinavia House: Nordic Centre in New York.  "It is the first exhibition in the United States to focus exclusively on contemporary Icelandic artists and their relationship to the singular geography of their country," it says on the website of Scandinavia House. 

 The exhibition features 11 of Iceland’s leading contemporary artists whose works cover a broad range of formal approaches and media, including painting, photography, sculpture, site-specific wall drawings, and video installations.

Icelandic artists are attuned to perpetual environmental flux, to physical changes in the land brought on by shifting geologic plates and volcanic eruptions, and the alternating solar rhythms of summer’s unending daylight and winter’s unsparing darkness. They have a heightened awareness of the environment as a dynamic, living entity—a place of extremes and dualities. With its fiery volcanoes, glacial ice caps, powerful waterfalls, and unpredictable, often-violent atmospheric conditions, the austere, beguiling landscape of Iceland functions as muse and material for many Icelandic artists.

ICELAND: Artists Respond to Place features the work of Birgir Andrésson, Guðrún Einarsdóttir, Olafur Eliasson, Georg Guðni Hauksson, Einar Falur Ingólfsson, Guðjón Ketilsson, Eggert Pétursson, Ragna Róbertsdóttir, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Katrín Sigurðardóttir, and Þórdís Alda Sigurðardóttir.

The exhibition is curated by Pari Stave and organized by the Katonah Museum of Art. Stave is an independent curator based in New York. Her recent exhibitions include MUNCH | WARHOL and the Multiple Image(Scandinavia House, 2013; co-curated with Patricia G. Berman); New Wave Finland: Contemporary Photography from the Helsinki School(Scandinavia House, 2013; co-curated with Timothy Persons); and the exhibition Magnetic North: Artists and the Arctic Circle (1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery, 2014). From 2011-2013 she served as Consulting Curator for Scandinavia House/The American-Scandinavian Foundation.