Looking Inward, Looking Outward: 140 years of the National Gallery of Iceland

The 140th anniversary of the founding of the National Gallery of Iceland is marked by a new exhibition: Looking Inward, Looking Outward: 140 Years of the National Gallery of Iceland. The exhibition highlights important acquisitions from the collection by nearly 100 artists, including significant gifts to the museum and important purchase.  

The exhibition is organized around four main themes: Society and Community; Picturing the Self and Others; Form, Line and Colour; and Humans and Nature. Certain works of art look outwards – at the country, the artist’s immediate surroundings, society, or the world as a whole – and tend to provide a vision that gives rise to self-realisation for individuals and society. Other works of art look inward, exploring the self, history or cultural heritage, also open an outward view – a broader perspective on the world.  

Close to 200 works by nearly 100 artists are displayed, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, installations and book art. The collection history span the period from the founding of the museum in 1884 – when the collection comprised mainly works by Danish artists  – to the era of the pioneers of Icelandic art, Þórarinn B. Þorláksson and Jóhannes S. Kjarval, to the postwar period represented by Nína Tryggvadóttir and Louisa Matthíasdóttir, and to the era of avant-garde artists such as Magnús Tómasson and Sigurður Guðmundsson. New works will also be shown, including Melanie Ubaldo’s But You’re Too Tanned Though for an Icelander, a work that points to how artists are continuously addressing new subjects and developments in society. The works on display provide insight into the history of Icelandic art, from its beginnings until the present day, while an international dimension is also present in works by world-renowned artists such as Edward Munch, Pablo Picasso, Dieter Roth and Roni Horn. 

Please note that the exhibition galleries close at varying times.

Art provides insight into the community which has nurtured the artist, while also offering
opportunities to broaden horizons and compare ideas from different periods. And art can reflect the
self-image of certain groups, or even a whole nation, and it may contribute to the evolution of a certain image, or bring out the society’s cultural roots.

Gallery 1 will close April 6th

Portraiture is the art of mediating the image of a person by conveying such personal traits as
physiognomy and character. There is an immortalizing aspect to the genre, for the portrait also
captures a person at a given moment in time, for perpetuity, revealing how one is seen, or wishes to
be seen, and establishing one’s place in society.

Gallery 2 will close March 3rd

Line, colour and form are among the fundamental elements of all visual art – even when the objective is to achieve a realistic portrayal of what is seen. In abstract art, where the intention is not to imitate reality, the focus is on these fundamental elements.

Gallery 3 will close February 2nd