BIRGIR ANDRÉSSON

Birgir Andésson (1955-2007) studied at the Icelandic College of Arts & Crafts and Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, Holland. During his lifetime Birgir actively exhibited around Scandinavia and Nothern Europe. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally. Major solo shows include a Retrospective at the The National Gallery of Iceland in 2006 and his contribution to the 1995 Venice Biennale where he represented Iceland.

Birgir´s work touches on the relationship between visual and spoken language, and the relationship between vision and thought. Finding his subjects in his closest surroundings; his work is based on the experience of being a participant in the Icelandic community in the late twentieth Century as well as from the exceptional experience of being born and brought up by blind parents. working with the artificial myth about the Icelandic national character and of Icelandic visual language most notable in his invented Icelandic coulour system and Portraits, based on descriptive texts of both people and animals. His work in general centers on the capacity of mechanical production to both enlarge and and diminish one´s experience of the past as a force in the present.

With his humorous structural investigations into the vernacular and extension of visual art into the textual sphere, Birgir became one of the most memorable persons of the second generation of Icelandic conceptual artists.