‘One Thing and Another, and The Sub More’

Hreinn Fridfinnsson’s work is as eclectic as it is idiosyncratic, but there are certain constants that have remained the same throughout her career spanning more than 50 years, and among them is her use of the objet trouvé – that is, taking something that is known (in a questionable abbreviated form) as the “real” world and recontextualising it in such a way that it can be considered (and this remains questionable) as art. But the way Fridfinnsson deploys this strategy eschews the kind of irony or critique often associated with it, instead leaning toward the sudden revelation of the unusual in the everyday, drawing specifically on the concreteness of the “real” as a portal in and out of something more ethereally and ephemerally “unreal” but which has, in fact, always been within the “real,” hidden or perhaps hiding, like the mysterious huldufólk [hidden people] that populate his native Iceland. This aspect of Fridfinnsson’s work is evident in his current exhibition One Thing and Another, and Then Some More at Elba Benítez Gallery, a show comprised of significant works from several decades of the artist’s career.