Eggert Pétursson: Millefleurs: Turku Art Museum, Finland

At the heart of Eggert Pétursson’s (b. 1956) art lies the Arctic flora. Drawing on an intimate knowledge of Iceland’s plant life and volcanic landscapes, the artist invents compositions that are both botanically precise and phantasmagorical, earthly and otherworldly. Attuned to the scale of the tundra’s resilient flowers, mosses, and lichens, Pétursson opens entire universes in his paintings.

The exhibition title Millefleurs celebrates the abundance of floral splendor in Pétursson’s paintings, in nature, and in the decorative styles of art history. Pétursson’s works range from meticulously realistic depictions of plants, repeated like seemingly endless patterns on a canvas, to almost abstract compositions, where layered paint creates relief-like surfaces. His art is both timely and timeless: it resonates with contemporary ecological and posthumanist themes while his visually striking compositions connect to abstraction, formalism, and conceptual art.

Devoted to his subject since childhood and deeply rooted in local traditions, Pétursson is one of Iceland’s most beloved artists. The exhibition focuses primarily on works produced over the past 15 years, many of which haven’t been seen before in Finland. Of the 29 paintings on display, 25 are on loan from Icelandic private collections, while the remainder come from the collections of the National Gallery of Iceland, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Sara Hildén Art Museum, and Turku Art Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue presenting Pétursson’s work that includes a newly commissioned essay by British writer Robert Macfarlane. It also features the documentary film Just Like a Painting by Eggert Pétursson (2020), directed by Gunnlaugur Þór Pálsson, which offers an intimate look at Pétursson’s artistic practice in dialogue with the Icelandic landscape.