Saturday, April 23rd from 4 – 5pm the Museum of Art and Design (MOAD) at MDC presents MOAD Talks with Linda Norden: Hot Pink and Secrets, What’s in a Box? This lecture takes as its premise the interrogative underpinning of Fridfinnsson’s project, the way his art begins in a question. It focuses, however, on particulars of Fridfinnsson’s process, on the care with which he identifies and crafts and deploys the deceptively simple objects he devises so as to capture and redirect our attention, and the stories he narrates to hold us. It will also take the occasion of his first American exhibition to consider the ways Fridfinnsson’s “Icelandic conceptualism” and storytelling become something more universal.
This program is free, but advance registration is required. Your attendance at this event includes free parking in the MDC garage at 500 NE Second Avenue. RSVP HERE.
Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s art is deeply rooted in a sense of curiosity and delight. It depends on his acute attention to the stories and objects that shape a history or habit, and the ways these stories and objects inform each other and act on us. Though his art is generally categorized as “conceptual,” Fridfinnsson’s approach differs fundamentally from much of the art we associate with that label; it begins not in critique, but in wonder, and not from a desire to privilege idea over object, per se. Fridfinnsson frames his concepts as questions and puts precisely tended objects and incident in dialogue with idea. His strategies borrow as much from storytelling and theater as from the photo-documentation and fondness for humble materials and overlooked detail that Conceptual Art took as given.
Fridfinnsson is Icelandic, a “farm boy” in his telling, who attended art school in London and found his way to a sophisticated, mostly European circle of artists and the vocabulary of conceptualism a bit later than those who first generated it. To borrow a phrase from Eileen Myles, a great American poet and critic, his art owes as much to “the importance of being Iceland,” as it does to his inspired wielding of conceptualist strategies.
Linda Norden is a curator, writer, and part-time professor of art history, theory, and criticism She has spent the better part of the past decade teaching in the MFA programs of Columbia University, Yale University, and Hunter College, and, most recently, in the B.F.A. and M.F.A. programs at Cornell’s Architecture, Art and Planning Program; and the B.F.A. and M.F.A. programs at the Malmo Art Academy in Malmo, Sweden.