Egill Saebjornsson

(2)

Yepp baby, living in Reykjavik is to have a grandmother that lived in earth-houses and now lives in concrete block of flat and having all the american movies BEFORE they are shown in Europe. We are SO UP TO DATE.

And everyone wanted to be here for a while when Bjorky was doing the big lift-off. But now, WHERE IS EVERYBODY????? Only Bjorky moved to Iceland but Damon Albarn is hardly ever more to be seen at KAFFIBARINN (the hottest hottest art bar in Reykjavik). Fifty years ago we only had like 20 painters in Iceland and half of them were amateur painters. Today there is more.

50 new kids are taken into the art-school every year. Now that’s a lot for such a small place. Seven of those go to multi-media department, eight to painting, seven to sculpture and the rest to graphic-designing, ceramics, textile and stuff like that. So we have like 20 new fine-art contemporary artists, what ever that contemporary means, coming out of the school every year. Mostly on weekends there are openings in galleries and museums.

Then everybody (100 people) goes let’s say to the Living Art Museum for an opening of a show with various artists from Germany, Holland, Sweden and the states. Gabriel Orozco, Louise Bourgeouis, Orlan, Johan Grimonprez, Felix Gonzales Torres, Dumas ... you know how it goes! Then every-one strolls down Laugarvegur down to Ingolfsstraeti 8 (which is the only kind of a International gallery in Iceland) to see an opening of Inga Svala Thorsdottir (Icelandic and lives in Hamburg) or of Roni Horn or Olafur Eliasson (lives in Berlin) or Elmgreen & Dragset.

One other international gallery was run independently by Petur Arason and his wife Ragna Robertsdottir, artist.

This gallery was called Second Floor and was in their appartment on Laugarvegur above the Levis store but Mr Arason is the owner of this store.

They did show many artists that otherwise were not shown in Iceland not even by the large museums. Example: Richard Long, On Kawara, Donald Judd, Lawrence Weiner. One other guy that runs a clothing store (running a gallery is not very profitable in Iceland) has a gallery called Galleri Saevar Karl and he has shows with many contemporary Icelandic artists.

The oldest gallery is Café Mokka close to Laugarvegur and almost every artist young or old has exhibited there. It is the grandmother of all galleries in Iceland. A great place where NOTHING has changed for the last 30 years exept for the pictures on the walls.

Young artists are coming up strong. The girls from The Icelandic Love Corporation were on the cover of SIKSI the nordic art-magazine followed with an article about those four young girls that are on the edge of becoming stars in Scandinavia, movingsouthwards.

As well we have a young generation coming from NY and LA influenced from the two scenes in U.S.A. Most kids still go to Europe to study their master-degree. We have The Icelandic Culture Enterprise art.is with the curator Hannes Sigurdsson in the front, doing cross-projects at a large scale in Iceland. There is no such thing as art-magazines in Iceland. There used to be but there is nothing today.