Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson

“The subject of my art is man and nature. Being a man, and the tradition of signs and symbols that man has established and continuous to develop. In that sense my art appears to expand all over. I was raised in a very small community, and it is hard to understand how strongly I was attracted to images of artworks I found in books, even in my very early childhood, when I had no possibility to comprehend what they stood for. All the same, they were narratives of historical events with a consciousness of each period. Then came explanative drawings in study-books etc.”

Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson attended the Icelandic Academy of Arts and Crafts from 1971 to 1976 before studying at De Vrije Academie in the Hague and then at Jan van Eyck Academie, in Maastricht. Since 1974 he has been active as a painter. He has regularly exhibited his work in Iceland, Europe and the U.S.A, and produced many artists’ books. He represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Starting from 1980, he has run a small showroom “The corridor”, in Reykjavík, with the aim to open up a door to art which would not otherwise be seen in Iceland. He is one of the founders of the Living Art Museum (1978), and a member since its conception. Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson’s paintings combine depictions of ordinary life and nature with dreams, legends and myths.   Featuring animal and human protagonists, his works lead us to think in anti-hierarchical terms – man being nothing more than a biological form among other biological forms.