Eggert Pétursson: Millefleurs: National Gallery of Iceland

Arctic flora lies at the heart of Eggert Pétursson’s art. Drawing on an intimate knowledge of Icelandic plants, Pétursson invents compositions that are both botanically accurate and imagined, earthly and transcendent. Attuned to the scale of the resilient flowers, ferns, and mosses found in harsh northern climates, Pétursson conjures entire worlds in his paintings, at times creating relief-like surfaces, where the canvas ground itself seems topographical.

The exhibition title Millefleurs celebrates the abundance of floral splendor in Pétursson’s work, linking it to the depiction of flowers in the larger history of art and design. The selection of works focuses primarily on paintings produced over the past 15 years, the period following Pétursson’s 2007 retrospective at the Reykjavík Art Museum. It marks a recent shift toward evoking the spiritual, brought about by Pétursson’s experience curating the 2019 exhibition, also at the Reykjavík Art Museum, of flower sketches and paintings by the Icelandic modernist master Jóhannes Sveinsson Kjarval.

One of Iceland’s most beloved artists, Eggert Pétursson (b. 1956) lives and works in Reykjavík, where he was born. He studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in Reykjavík and received a graduate degree from the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 1981. Although his paintings are representational, his artistic roots are in the Fluxus and conceptual art movements that dominated the 1960s and 1970s. His work resonates with posthumanist and ecological concerns.

The exhibition was co-organized by the National Gallery of Iceland and the Turku Art Museum in Finland.