LIST - Icelandic Art News

The Reykjavik Art Museum is Iceland’s largest art institution though its mission has always been less certain than that of the National Gallery, charged with assembling and hosting a representative collection of Iceland’s visual arts. The Reykjavik Art Museum now operates in three locations and attracts over 150 000 visitors a year to a varied exhibition programme that includes both works from the city’s permanent collection and exhibitions of contemporary Icelandic artists and art from abroad. Its director, appointed for a limited term, is by default one of the most influential people in the Icelandic art world and a new one has just started work this month. His name is Hafþór Yngvason.

The director who is now leaving the museum, Eiríkur Þorláksson, oversaw the most extensive expansion of the museum to date when it set up headquarters in the converted Harbour House in the city centre. While more than doubling the museum’s exhibition space, the move also highlighted the somewhat problematic role of the institution in city’s cultural life, including the problem of funding the ambitious exhibition programme required to support its exhibition venues and the various controversies that inevitably surround a major public art institution.

The museum’s first headquarters were the first public building designed and erected specifically to house and exhibit art. Built in 1966-1972, Kjarvalsstaðir opened in 1972 and totally transformed the exhibition scene in the city. With two large halls the new building allowed for exhibitions on a scale never seen before and also provided storage and facilities to house and tend to a large collection of mostly contemporary art, including the largest collection of works by pre-eminent artist Kjarval for whom the building was named. At the time, the National Gallery was still being operated in collaboration with the National Museum of antiquities with very limited exhibition space and almost no opportunities for exhibiting contemporary art. The need for exhibition space was so great that Kjarvalsstaðir was operated for more than a decade with little curatorial direction, simply providing a venue for artists who organised and financed their own exhibitions in the halls. Only in the 1980s did the museum start to move towards the kind of organisation most common to such institutions around the world, with a planned programme of commissioned and curated exhibitions and publications. At the same time, people started to talk of the need for further expansion. The museum’s short history has thus been one of constant movement and change, as though it was always working to catch up to its own role, waiting to come into its own.

As Eiríkur Þorláksson, an art historian and experienced administrator, prepared to leave, there was much speculation on who would take his place. some favoured the idea of bringing in someone from abroad who could be free from the internal politics of the Icelandic art scene and would foster the museum’s international standing. From among the local candidates, most looked to Hannes Sigurðsson, an energetic curator, art entrepreneur and, lately, director of the Akureyri Art Museum in the north of Iceland. In a surprise move, however, Hannes withdrew his candidature, opting to renegotiate his contact with the town of Akureyri. The winning candidate, Hafþór Yngvason, was also a bit of a surprise; an Icelander who had been living in the United States for the best part of two decades and had taken no part in the Icelandic art scene, he nonetheless had all the qualifications needed and seemed to possess both the international and local knowledge needed to take the museum to the next stage in its development.

Hafþór studied philosophy at the University of Iceland, graduating in 1982. He then moved to the United States and finished his Masters’ degree at the university of New Mexico before moving to Massachusetts where he eventually took a second degree in art history at Harvard University and started a career in art administration. from 1995, Hafþór was director of Public Art for the city of Cambridge, responsible for art in public places and for the city’s art exhibitions.

While the new director has avoided any public proclamations of his intentions, preferring sensibly to acquaint himself better with the art world in which he is now to assume such great responsibility, a recent interview with American journalist Christine Temin, published in Morgunblaðið’s cultural supplement, gives a few hints of what we might expect, emphasising his interest in art that extends out from the museum environment into public spaces. What is certain is that with the museum’s budgets already stretched and now facing further cuts, he will have his work cut out keep the exhibition programme ticking over and to build the museum’s participation in the rapidly expanding Reykjavik art world. A lot has changed in the twenty years since Hafþór left Iceland for America but the times are still a-changing and everyone looks to the city of Reykjavik and its flagship museum to take the lead or at least keep up with the dynamic art scene with its unique combination of local and international flavours. It is a heady cocktail and the new director will have to drain the full cup if the museum is to continue to grow and mature.