Hreinn Fridfinnsson (1943–2024)

Icelandic Conceptual artist Hreinn Friðfinnsson, known for his playful, poetic works incorporating everyday objects, has died at the age of eighty-one. Considered one of Iceland’s leading artists, Friðfinnsson for seventy years explored issues of time, self, and perception via a practice encompassing performance, sculpture, photography, drawing, and installation. Employing materials that varied widely in scale and substance, he created works that are often physically spare but highly lyrical and emotionally resonant, transcending their humble origins and seemingly commonplace subjects.

Born in 1943 in Baer Dölum, Iceland, Friðfinnsson was raised on a farmstead. As a youth, he was a compulsive illustrator, cranking out pictures of wild animals while perched atop a hay bale. “For as long as I remember, I had this obsession,” he told the websiteHit Icelandin 2017. “I was constantly drawing and consuming anything related to art.” Friðfinnsson enrolled in the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts at the age of fifteen, graduating in 1958. Shortly thereafter, he met Dieter Roth, who had moved to Iceland in the late 1950s. Friðfinnsson in the mid-1960s helped to found the avant-garde group SÚM, which eschewed the landscapes and abstractions that were locally popular at the time in favor of art influenced by Pop and the readymades of Duchamp. Roth and Friðfinnsson worked with the modernist group to present exhibitions in Reykjavík, the country’s capital.

In 1971, Friðfinnsson moved to Amsterdam, where he would remain for the rest of his life. It was here that he turned to Conceptual art, initially relying on photographs to “visualize the invisible,” as Miriam Rosen wrote in a 1991 issue of Artforum, with works themed around folklore, literature, and dreams. He soon turned to a broader array of materials that would eventually include such diverse items as fossils, envelopes, chicken wire, wood, fake crystals, Play-Doh, and cardboard. A notable early Amsterdam work is First House, 1974, an inside-out cottage constructed on a remote site that conjured the paradoxes of Bertrand Russell (“the set of all sets that do not contain themselves”). Its interior clad in corrugated iron and the exterior covered in wallpaper, “the house suddenly becomes infinitely large, containing everything in the universe, except itself,” wrote Adam Jasper in a 2019 issue of Artforum.

Friðfinnsson expanded his oeuvre to incorporate Claude glass and mirrors, which he deployed in photographic series. Fascinated by irrational numbers and the Fibonacci sequence, he created assemblages centered around them. Time remained an enduring concern, as revealed in his 2007 solo exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery. “Notions of time are always compelling,” he affirmed. “I read what comes my way about physics and mathematics, but I read as one who is uninitiated. The feeling and the interest in the essence of time is serious, but my dealing with time is not knowledge-based; it is more exploratory and feeling-based.”

In addition to his exhibition at Serpentine, Friðfinnsson enjoyed solo shows of his work at institutions including the National Gallery, Reykjavík; Bergen Konsthall, Norway; Malmö Konsthall, Sweden; Magasin-Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; and Kyoto Art Center, Japan. A major retrospective of his work, “To Catch a Fish with a Song: 1964–Today” opened at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, in 2019 before traveling to KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, which co-organized the exhibition. Friðfinnsson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 2000, he was awarded the Ars Fennica Prize, Finland’s largest and most prestigious art award.