Artist of the Year 2023: Hrafnkell Sigurðsson

In 2022, all of Reykjavík watched as inscrutable, moving images appeared on 450 billboards all over the city, in bus stops and on large advertising signs. The screens showed an ever changing fog, sometimes forming shapes and patterns which then dissolved again. This was not a malfunction, but the work Resolution by Hrafnkell Sigurðsson, created from large, composite photographs from 2018, where countless tiny planes are joined in a blurred mosaic image. Each plane is an enlargement from a photograph from the Hubble space telescope, which shows galaxies as they were millions of years ago, at the moment the light that the telescope captures set off. Sigurðsson selected fragments from the images from in between galaxies, where nothing seems visible. When it is blown up, however, colours and lines appear, and Sigurðsson then pieces them together. From the images that show nothing, a picture suddenly appeared. The project is a collaboration between Reykjavik Art Museum and Y gallery.