NEW YORK, NY.- Iceland: Artists Respond to Place, which opened at Scandinavia House: The Nordic Center in America on Thursday, October 9, 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.

Iceland is one of the youngest and most geologically active landmasses on earth, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the visually stunning works of these artists. Twenty-one works ranging from painting to site-specific installation address not only the concrete features of Iceland, but also the conceptual realms of history, memory, myth, and imagination as they relate to the country’s unique environment. With its fiery volcanoes, glacial ice caps, powerful waterfalls, and alternating solar rhythms of summer’s unending daylight and winter’s unsparing darkness, the austere beauty of Iceland functions as muse and material for many Icelandic artists.

Curated by Pari Stave, Iceland: Artists Respond to Place features 11 artists—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—and covers a broad range of formal approaches and media, including painting, photography, sculpture, and video installations.

Egill Sæbjörnsson’s witty, surreal video installation imagines lava rocks as living beings, a sly reference to the myth of huldufólk, or hidden folk, who live in the land. Eggert Pétursson’s large tapestry-like paintings focus exclusively on the indigenous flora of Iceland—the minute mosses and flowers that cling to the tundra and lava fields—which he renders with near obsessive attention to detail. In contrast, Olafur Eliasson’s aerial photographs trace the entire length of an Icelandic river as it meanders from its source in the mountains to the sea, compressing an enormous expanse of terrain into a single view. Katrín Sigurðardóttir’s series of wooden travel boxes contain generic landscapes inspired by Iceland’s treeless topographies; her miniature environments are a dramatic reversal of scale between the human figure and its relationship to the environment. Two artists, Guðjón Ketilsson and Ragna Róbertsdóttir, will travel from Iceland to create their installations on site in the Scandinavia House gallery. Ketilsson’s wall drawing Stígar/Paths will be a text-map charting the artist’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts as he wanders the streets of Reykjavík, while Róbertsdóttir will compose her minimalist wall sculpture from lava pumice collected from different volcanic sites in Iceland.

“Iceland: Artists Respond to Place offers a unique and very timely look at the visual arts in Iceland today, providing a compelling overview of the highly varied, sometimes idiosyncratic artistic visions to be found there. We are delighted to add this to the long list of exhibitions presented at Scandinavia House over the past 14 years that explore the contemporary Nordic art scene,” says Edward P. Gallagher, President of The American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF).