Reykjavík Art Museum: Iceland’s artistic pulse

By Nane Steinhoff | Photos: Reykjavík Art Museum

Nestled in Iceland’s bustling capital, Reykjavík Art Museum celebrates creativity and community with engaging exhibitions and invites visitors to experience the country’s ever-evolving story of contemporary art.

Reykjavík Art Museum is considered Iceland’s largest visual arts venue, renowned for championing both established and emerging artists. Rather than being contained within a single structure, the museum operates across three unique venues: Hafnarhús, Kjarvalsstaðir, and Ásmundarsafn. Each venue offers its own unique atmosphere, background and pace, forming a vibrant network of artistic spaces. “Together, they allow us to tell multiple stories at once: about artists and practices, about Reykjavík as a city, and about how visual culture evolves in close dialogue with social and physical surroundings,” explains museum director Markús Þór Andrésson.

Markús Þór Andrésson, museum director.

Three locations, one goal

“At its core, the museum was established to safeguard and activate Reykjavík’s visual art heritage while remaining fully engaged with the present,” says Andrésson. The museum is therefore built on preserving, reinterpreting and critically re-examining artist-led projects and notable individual collections, including those of Erró, Ásmundur Sveinsson, and Jóhannes S. Kjarval.

Importantly, since its opening in 1973, the museum has been more than just a storage space. It was designed to be an active public venue where art could reflect and respond to social changes, urban growth, and cultural shifts. As Reykjavík expanded, both in population and culture, the museum helped provide structure and continuity to these changes. It aimed to connect new ideas with history and make memory part of everyday experience. Today, each of the museum’s three venues embodies a different facet of this very ambition.

Hafnarhús Museum.

Hafnarhús, positioned in Reykjavík’s historic old harbour, stands out as “the most outward-looking space,“ according to Andrésson. Once a bustling warehouse, the space symbolises renewal and transformation by embracing contemporary experimentation and regularly featuring exhibitions that blur the lines between artistic disciplines, including media, performance, sound, and time-based installations. Its reputation for energetic displays is further enhanced by its dedication to the works of Erró, one of Iceland’s most renowned post-modern artists.

Exhibition at Kjarvalsstaðir, Guðrún Kristjánsdóttir: Traces.

Kjarvalsstaðir, on the other hand, offers a different speed as the space focuses on works of one of Iceland’s most influential and recognised artists, Jóhannes S. Kjarval, Icelandic modernism and painting traditions, “though never as something fixed or closed,” says Andrésson.

Kjarvalsstaðir Museum.

The third of the houses, Ásmundarsafn, was designed by sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson as both a home and studio, and challenged conventional exhibition formats. Andrésson explains: “It’s almost the inverse of the white cube: a highly personal, idiosyncratic environment where sculptures, contemporary projects, architecture, and landscape merge.”

Exhibition highlights

This summer, Hafnarhús’s special focus will be international and contemporary with the exhibition Karin Sander 1957–2057, which will showcase some of the most impressive works of the Berlin-based conceptual artist. “The exhibition invites visitors to see themselves – literally – become part of the work through scanning, replication, and site specific interventions,” says Andrésson.

At the other end of the spectrum, at Kjarvalsstaðir, Big Little City turns inwards and embraces the local and the quirky. The exhibition presents a focused and lively depiction of Reykjavík’s urban history, unique architecture, and idiosyncratic scale through art, design and visual culture. Andrésson adds: “Together, these exhibitions capture the museum’s distinctive balance – anchored in Reykjavík’s character while fully engaged with the wider contemporary art world.”

This balance also reflects Reykjavík Art Museum’s belief that art is not merely an object to be viewed, but a way of generating knowledge. Many exhibitions therefore function not simply as displays, but as research- based environments that include archives, writings, performances, and public conversations. “We don’t aim to define what Icelandic art is; rather, we’re interested in what it does – how it thinks, how it acts, and how it responds to the world,” explains Andrésson. “Our exhibition programme tends to move between two poles: careful historical reassessment and bold contemporary production.”

Beyond exhibitions, the municipal museum is deeply woven into Reykjavík’s cultural life and works closely alongside schools, artists, communities and scholars. Outreach programmes, education, workshops, artist talks, and art installations in the capital’s public spaces are meant to nurture creativity across all ages.

Whether exploring Reykjavík for the first time or returning as an art lover, Reykjavík Art Museum offers a journey into the creative heart of Iceland. “The museum becomes a place of dialogue – between past and present, between local experience and global conversations, and between artists and audiences,” concludes Andrésson. “In a world that often demands quick conclusions, we try to hold space for complexity, uncertainty, and questions that do not resolve easily.”