The title of the recent Birgir Andrésson retrospective, “As Far as the Eye Can See,” takes on a bittersweet resonance when one considers that the renowned Icelandic artist was raised by blind parents. This fact puts Andrésson’s recourse to language-based work and his heavy use of color in a different light. If Sol LeWitt, in his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967), observed that such art should be “mentally interesting” and “emotionally dry,” Andrésson’s oeuvre proves that there is space for humor, beauty, and sentiment within it.
Curated by Robert Hobbs, “As Far as the Eye Can See” surveyed the artist’s three-decade-long career, which was cut short by his death in 2007 at the age of fifty-two. Andrésson started his Conceptual practice in the mid-1970s and used an international artistic idiom to question local topics. In 2004 he stated: “My works aren’t based on Iceland, just like they aren’t based on Spain, Argentina, or Afghanistan. Some might regard them as Icelandic, but that must be for the simple fact that I’m Icelandic and have been brought up here.”
