Sample from 'Uppábúinn Stóll og sögumadur' ('A dressed up chair and a narrator').
Helgi Thorgils Fridjónsson (Helgi Þorgils Friðjónsson) is an Icelandic painter, whose work makes occasional use of comic strip-like narratives.
Life and career
Helgi Thorgils Fridjónsson was born in 1953 in Búdardalur, Iceland, where he was raised too. He attended the Icelandic College of Art and Craft in the capital Reykjavik. During the 1970s he moved to The Netherlands, to study at art schools in The Hague and Maastricht. His earliest work was inspired by the Icelandic conceptual artists of the 1970s, such as Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Krtistján Gudmundsson and Hreinn Fridfinnsson. Fridjónsson eventually chose for a simplification of his work, in which the concept is more important than the visual aspect of the work. Some of his late 1970s work shares a strong resemblance with the comics format. It consists of sequential drawings with texts, that deal with the relationship between man and nature.
Fridjónsson was one of the painters involved at the beginning of the New Painting movement that was launched in Iceland in 1980. His drawings, graphics and sculptures can be desciribed as surreal and naive, with recurring themes like solitude and humanity in nature, and surreal figures like centaurs and angels. Legends and folklore are regularly referenced to in his work, which has been exhibited in Reykjavik, Iceland, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Frankfurt and Washington D.C. and Salzburg.
'Indigo Night' (2014).