Hreinn Fridfinnsson: For the Time Being

Spanning six decades, the first American museum exhibition of the influential work of Hreinn Fridfinnsson highlights the artist’s use of minimal gestures to transform everyday materials into poetic, allusive, and revelatory works of art.
Fridfinnsson’s art is often recursive and contingent, casting a wide net of references, often to others of the artist’s works, even if decades old, and dependent on vagaries of atmosphere and perception for its effect. Consequently, most of his major exhibitions, including the one at MOAD, gather works from across the multiple decades of his career, without regard for chronology or ideas of artistic development. For the Time Being, as the title intimates, marks a provisional summation of the artist’s achievement, less a traditional retrospective than an assembly of instantiations of his unique sensibility.
In this video by Konstantia Kontaxis, the artist looks back on his practice and on specific works that emobdy his distinctive world view.
Fridfinnsson was born in 1943 in Baer Dölum, Iceland. He graduated from the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavik in 1958. In the 1960s, he was a co-founder of the Icelandic artist group SÚM and of Gallery SÚM in 1969. In 1971 the artist moved to Amsterdam and began exhibiting at galleries in the Netherlands and other European countries. Exhibitions of his work were held at the Malmö Konsthall in Malmö, Sweden, in 1978; at Le Magasin-Centre national d’art contemporain in Grenoble, France, in 1987; at the National Gallery in Reykjavik in 1993; at the Kyoto Art Center and the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France, in 2002; at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2007; and at the Centre d’art Contemporain in Geneva and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2019. His work was included in Sleeping Beauty-Art Now: Scandinavia Today at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1982; in the São Paulo Bienal in 2012; and in Skulptur Projekte Münster in Münster, Germany, in 2017. Fridfinnsson represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 1993.