Stockholm Art Week takes place this year from the 27th of April to the 1st of May, with Market Art Fair over the weekend from the 29th of April until the 1st of May.
Stockholm Art Week is a platform showcasing leading Nordic art fairs alongside many of Stockholm’s prominent museums, institutions, and art spaces that will arrange special programs, events, and pop-up exhibitions throughout the duration of the week. The annual celebration of Stockholm’s vibrant art scene aims to promote the visual arts to a wider audience and showcase Sweden as a global art destination.
Market Art Fair is a leading contemporary art fair in the Nordic region Initiated in 2006 by galleries representing the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, the fair has become a trusted meeting and market place in the heart of the Nordic art industry. Here are the moments in this year’s program where you can enjoy Icelandic art:
At the fair’s Market Talks you can attend a conversation on Saturday at 14:30 between two of Iceland’s leading contemporary artists, Shoplifter (Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir) and Egill Sæbjörnsson, exploring their highly individual, playful and compelling artistic practices. The talk will be moderated by independent curator and critic Jonatan Habib Engqvist.
Shoplifter / Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir is one of Iceland’s leading contemporary artists, based in New York. Working with both synthetic and natural hair, her sculptures, wall murals and site-specific installations explore themes of vanity, self-image, fashion, beauty and popular myth. Shoplifter represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2019 with the installation Chromo Sapiens. The installation later traveled to Iceland opening at the Reykjavik Art Museum in January 2020 and how now found its permanent home at her newly opened art venue Höfuðstöðin.
Egill Sæbjörnsson lives and works in Berlin and Reykjavik. At the forefront of experimentation, he combines music, sculpture, video projection and animations, as well as his own performance – whether as a mime artist, speaker, actor, musician, or singer – to create fictional spatial narratives. Theatrical, poetic and playful, ordinary dormant objects come alive in Sæbjörnsson’s works – be they plastic buckets, a wall, rough stones or handbags – drawing the viewer into a wondrous world where the real and the imagined collide. He represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 2017 with the exhibition Out of Controll, featuring the giant invisible trolls Ūgh and Bõögâr.
Egill Sæbjörnsson will also be showing works at various venues around Stockholm for Art Week – including Kummelholmen, Moderna Museet, a public work at Vårberg Centrum, and the solo exhibition OBJECT SPECIES:The Lipsticks featuring Ūgh and Bõögâr at Andy’s Gallery.
Installation view of Market Art Fair 2022 featuring three works by Arna Óttarsdóttir.
Icelandic gallery i8 is also participating in the fair presenting textile works, photography, prints, sculptures, and works on paper by four gallery artists: Birgir Andrésson, Ólafur Elíasson, B. Ingrid Olson, and Arna Óttarsdóttir.
