Icelandic painters: a guide to the artists who shaped Icelandic art

Þórarinn trained in law before switching to painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. In the summer of 1900 he held what is generally regarded as the first exhibition of Icelandic painting held in Iceland — a genuine starting point for the country's visual art history.

Working alongside Ásgrímur Jónsson, he developed a romantic, naturalistic style built around Iceland's mountains and coastline, and the two of them effectively founded Icelandic landscape painting as a serious practice rather than an import from Copenhagen.

One of the first Icelanders to make a living from art, Ásgrímur studied at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and returned with a style closer to French Impressionism — loose, light-driven, and devoted almost entirely to Icelandic mountains and terrain.

His influence reached the next generation directly: Jóhannes Kjarval, arguably Iceland's most celebrated painter, learned from him. Before his death, Ásgrímur donated his Reykjavík house and his personal collection — 192 oil paintings and 277 watercolors — to the Icelandic government. It now operates as the Ásgrímur Jónsson Collection within the National Gallery of Iceland.

Kjarval is the closest thing Iceland has to a single defining painter — he appears on the 2,000 krónur banknote and has an entire wing of the Reykjavík Art Museum, Kjarvalsstaðir, named for him. Born into poverty and working as a fisherman before art, he was admitted to the Royal Danish Academy at 27 with funding raised by fellow fishermen.

His subject, obsessively, was Iceland's lava fields, moss, and closest ground rather than distant mountains — rendered in a style that shifts between Cubist fracture and near-abstraction, sometimes folding elves and folklore into the landscape itself. He is credited with changing how Icelanders themselves looked at their own terrain.

One of the very few women among Iceland's early professional painters, Nína studied under Ásgrímur Jónsson before formal training at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, then Paris. In 1942 she moved to New York with fellow painter Louisa Matthíasdóttir to study at the Art Students League.

Her practice ranged well beyond oil painting into paper collage, stained glass, and mosaic, but Icelandic landscape and the particular quality of Nordic light stayed a constant reference point across all of it — an abstracted, internalized version of the same terrain Ásgrímur and Kjarval painted more directly.

Louisa left Iceland for Copenhagen at seventeen, studied with Marcel Gromaire in Paris, returned to Iceland during the Second World War, then settled permanently in New York in 1942 — where she studied with Hans Hofmann alongside painters including Robert De Niro Sr. and Jane Freilicher.

Despite building her career in New York, her paintings stayed rooted in flattened, strongly composed Icelandic landscapes and still lifes. She received Iceland's Order of the Falcon in 1988 and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters — recognition on both sides of the Atlantic.

Born Guðmundur Guðmundsson in Ólafsvík, Erró trained in engraving, fresco, and painting at the Academy of Oslo before building a career almost entirely outside Iceland — based mainly in Paris, with long stretches in Thailand and on the Spanish island of Formentera.

His work is the outlier in this list stylistically: dense, collaged pop-art paintings built from comic books, advertising, and mass media imagery. In 1989 he donated a large body of his work to the Reykjavík Art Museum, and a fifty-year retrospective of his collage work was staged at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2010.

Jón Óskar works in encaustic — pigment suspended in molten beeswax, applied hot — after years spent in New York during the early-1980s resurgence of the city's art scene. It's a technique with almost no other serious practitioners in Icelandic painting, which makes his output distinct on sight: dark, narrow-palette surfaces, brushwork in black over a brownish ground, built around the tension between what a surface appears to be and what it actually is.

For the mechanics of the medium itself, see the encaustic & beeswax painting guide

Georg Guðni studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Craft before continuing at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. His 1985 debut solo show at Reykjavík's Living Art Museum reframed what Icelandic landscape painting could look like — less topography, more atmosphere, mountains reduced to soft horizon and color field.

He won the DV Cultural Award in 1988 and was nominated for the Nordic region's Ars Fennica Award in 2000, cementing a reputation as the artist who took the landscape tradition founded by Þórarinn and Ásgrímur and dissolved it into something closer to mood than depiction.

Full disclosure: this is the author of this page. Georg Óskar (Georgos Karis) spent his first years in Crete before growing up in Iceland, trained at the Akureyri School of Visual Arts and later earned an MFA from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, and now works from a studio in Oslo.

The practice is inside-out rather than planned: paintings develop through accumulation, rupture, and revision in oil and cold wax rather than a fixed composition worked out in advance — closer in spirit to Kjarval's instinctive mark-making than to the tighter naturalism of the earlier landscape painters. The work has shown in Spain, Germany, China, Switzerland, the UK, Norway, and Iceland.