Icelandic conceptual art is a concept in its own right. Within a few decades Icelandic artists – of whom there are far too many good ones in relation to the population of Iceland – have developed it into a genre in its own right. In addition to questions undermining conventional thinking and seeing and the reformulation and rearrangement of the categories of seeing and experiencing which are all characteristic of conceptual art, Icelandic conceptual art is also marked by an extremely refined and usually meagre form: severity and lyricism.

Hreinn Fridfinnsson is one of the leading classics of Icelandic conceptual art. Another Icelandic artist, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, has, with due cause, remarked: "Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s art is pure poetry." It is both pure – lucidly thought out, scant and even mundane in its themes – as well as lyrical. It is able to evoke strong feelings of wonder, recognition and communality.

In terms of form, Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s work can be almost anything: a photograph of a fairy cathedral in Iceland, the mood of an evening or a quasi-scientific experiment with beauty as its objective. A pencil tracing through paper of the forms of the rock of Mont Sainte-Victoire, a three-dimensional sculptural illusion based on reflection, or an installation of pieces of glass, giving corporeal form to snow, rain or the feeling of tears. Fridfinnsson investigates ways of seeing, feeling and understanding. He knows what kinds of experience, knowledge and memories are shared by people and how feeling can be crystallized in the experience of viewing. Even his smallest works are in some way more significant than their scale – each one of them contains a big idea or emotion, or both.

Ilona Anhava, 2001
Translation: Jüri Kokkonen

"Hreinn Fridfinsson is a poet. He "speaks" to us about the light, the wind, the landscape, about the rocks and crystals, about the gravity and about sentiment. In 1972 he created gates for the South Wind at a lonely spot on the southern coast of Iceland. He constructed them in such a manner that the South Wind could open the leaves of the gates. On one rainy day, when he had just finished constructing the gates and was taking a photograph of them, the wind blew from the north; the leaves remained closed and the artist never again returned to that place.

This is a story which has the same power as a "child's story"; a power that allows the undisguised idea and action to flow into a picture. A year later the wind from the sea blows so strongly in his face that his eyes become filled with tears, but despite this, he still keeps his eyes fixed on the stormy sea. The picture that catches this event is composed of a simply framed sheet of paper with the words "I have looked at the sea through my tears" in an unobtrusive line. Also this work possesses in its simplicity the generative power of the remembrance of ourselves as we gradually discovered the world step by step for ourselves. He "paints" (1992) on a deep blue background of light a "song" with the help of a voice-amplifying oscillograph and the forms associate longing, melancholy – songs of a kind we perhaps no longer know. Last year he put a 30-cm high prism on a tripod and caught the light of the rainbow with the hands, just as we in our childhood desired to walk beneath the rainbow bridge. The works of Hreinn Fridfinsson captivate by their conceptual sharpness. Thanks to this, he is able to capture the strongest emotions by the simplest means."

Jean-Christophe Ammann, April 2000