We travel around Northeast Iceland through a history that spans over a century. We stop and look at fjords, valleys, villages and farms through the eyes of people who know them better than anyone else. These are Paintings from Home, painted with love and warmth, filled with a sense of place and memories of the past. It so happens that on this trip we are unusually lucky with the weather! 

Educated or self-taught artists have grabbed the paintbrush and created works in a personal conversation with places and memories. The motivation is based on a sincere desire to show and tell, to deepen connections, to remember and preserve, rather than taking on trends and styles in artistic context. Here you will for example find early works of renowned artists as well as works by people of different steps of society, some of whom started to paint in their retirement. Some are beloved artists in their hometowns, others are outsider artist who went their own way. The works show places where these artists were born, raised or had a special relationship to. 

The paintings tell the story of different individuals, but there are works by around thirty artists from the Northeastern part of the country. They also convey the story of a homogeneous society sharing a similar fate in times of social change. In the twentieth century, people moved from farms to villages, and from the countryside to the capital. This migration is intertwined with changes in the fields of education and culture, commerce and services, employment and economic development as well as social relations. The Paintings from Home remain as an attempt to slow down this progress, to stop time, to capture something before it is too late. 

How do they speak to us today?