Max Protetch Gallery is pleased to announce its first exhibition of work by Icelandic artist Steingrimur Eyfjörd. For Environment / Revolution, Eyfjörd has converted the gallery’s Project Space into a lab for a participatory psychological/perceptual experiment; the exhibition includes paintings, lightbox sculptures, text, and photographs that document past experimental subjects and invite the viewer to participate as a subject.

Steingrimur Eyfjörd represented Iceland at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007, and has shown widely in institutions in Europe. This marks only the third time that he has exhibited in the United States. Born in 1954, Eyfjord lives and works in Reykjavik and has been a fixture of the cultural scene there since the late 1970s. His work incorporates diverse influences: his paintings, sculptures, videos, texts, and photographs contains strains of conceptualism, pop art, personal and cultural mythology (including ancient legends and sagas) and an irreverent approach to contemporary life and culture. Interviews with other artists, books, films and Icelandic folklore are just some of points of departure from which Eyfjord’s work has developed.

The idea for Environment/Revolution exhibition began when Eyfjörd came across two old Life magazine covers, one depicting a woman holding a child’s hand (with the headline ‘Environment’) and the other depicting riot police as seen through a burning flag (‘Revolution’). Despite the fact that the covers were printed decades ago, the issues they identify continue to resonate. In order to examine the way that the mind processes information communicated by the media, and to establish a more personal, more fundamental perspective on that information, Eyfjörd used the Life images to create two lightboxes; each features a silhouette derived from the magazine covers. Eyfjord then stared into the lightboxes, one at at time, before closing his eyes to study the afterimages; he then traced what he saw, or what he imagined he saw, onto a piece of paper. Finally, other subjects were invited by the artist to interpret the drawings that he made.

These drawings and interpretations were transformed by Eyfjörd into a series of paintings on aluminum panels. The paintings display a wide range of cultural and personal associations, and represent an act of what the artist calls ‘metaphysical recycling’, in which subjects rummage through the ‘cultural wastebasket’ in search of ideas and images. This recycling will continue during the run of the exhibition: a chaise lounge will be placed in the gallery so that viewers can be seated and stare into the lightboxes as Eyfjörd did. They will be provided with paper on which to record their own versions of what appears behind their eyelids. In addition, a printed conversation between the artist and a friend about the experiment and the issues it raises will be on display, as are the original Life covers and photographs of the original magazines in stacks.