VENICE, ITALY.- Steingrimur Eyfjörd is Iceland ’s representative to the 52nd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. The artist will present a group of 14 new works collectively entitled The Golden Plover Has Arrived, commissioned by Christian Schoen, Director of the CIA.IS -Center for Icelandic Art and curated by Hanna Styrmisdottir, an independent curator based in Reykjavik.

Steingrimur Eyfjörd is one of the foremost of a generation of artists who came to prominence in Iceland during the 1970s. His prolific output over the past 25 years draws on his experience not only as artist but as a comic strip author, magazine editor, writer, curator and teacher. His work employs a wide variety of media, including photography, comic strip, video, painting, sculpture, performance, writing and installation. His art may appear equally diverse conceptually: founded on influences as disparate as folk tales, Icelandic sagas, women’s fashion magazines, religion, superstition, critical theory and many other current topics, Eyfjörd’s chains of association intersect at a nodal point of multiple meaning, forming a body of work that is multi-layered and complex yet always reveals an articulate and unexpected approach to the issues at hand.

The Golden Plover Has Arrived - The golden plover is a small wading bird, regarded as the harbinger of spring in Iceland . Its arrival in the country in late March, early April, is invariably announced in the local media.

The Golden Plover Has Arrived brings together seemingly arbitrary threads of culture, economy and politics in a discerning analysis of contemporary Icelandic society.

As part of the work, Eyfjörd consulted and collaborated with people from all walks of life, among them artists and academics. He also visited a medium who put him in contact with an elf or hidden person, normally invisible to human eyes, a common and still popular myth in Iceland. The purpose of this was to buy an elf sheep for The Sheep Pen, the central work in The Golden Plover. This somewhat surreal act highlights one of the most intangible concerns in Eyfjörd’s work: his interest in the function of consciousness in the construction of physical reality. This aspect of Eyfjörd’s work is also a reflection of a belief and culture particular to Iceland , and can be further explored in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.