On the edge of Reykjavík overlooking the sea, lies the former house and studio of 20th-century Icelandic sculptor Sigurjón Ólafsson (1908–82). Located on the Laugarnes peninsula, it was once a military pharmacy and a corrugated-steel Nissen hut. The artist began converting the complex in 1945. In the 1960s, he commissioned a modern timber studio and extension from Icelandic architect Skarphéðinn Jóhannsson.
Today, it is a museum, directed by Ólafsson’s widow Inga Birgitta Spur (b.1931), who lives in the adjoining house, surrounded by his abstract sculptures. Whether organic or surreal, honed or raw, each grapples inward with its identity, while collectively they find harmony together like a cast of familiar characters co-existing with the ephemera of life.
When Ólafsson died, it became Spur’s responsibility to preserve his collection of more than 200 works. She commissioned Ögmundur Skarphéðinsson, son of the former architect, to adapt the house and studio into a museum, which opened in 1988. The studio – originally clad with dark-brown tar oil – was painted white, accentuating its geometric volume, while an extension added a new gallery and café, which serves cakes baked by Spur.
This is Spur’s 70th year of living in Iceland. She was born in Denmark to a pianist and a pastor, and studied art at the Danish Royal Academy. At 18 years old, she met established sculptor Ólafsson, 23 years her senior and then at the peak of his career. She began apprenticing in his Copenhagen studio, preparing scaffolds for monumental clay sculptures. There, he encouraged her emotional instincts and taught her ‘how to let art speak to you’.
In her Siberian pine-clad living room, within the black timber extension, a picture window frames a rectangle of sea. Throwing shadows on the yellow curtains, a sculpture of wood, iron and copper twists into shape. ‘It has so many layers,’ observes Spur of the piece, explaining that it represents ‘his search for expression’, which in turn draws you into your own ‘expedition to find art in your own way’.
For Spur, this parallel quest, between artist and viewer, is what brings Ólafsson’s sculptures to life. ‘When artists know what they want and who they want to be, they’re static, they’re resting, they’re not pushing,’ she says. ‘He didn’t want to be popular, because God forbid he would have to repeat himself – that's the kind of artist he was,’ adds his daughter Hlíf Sigurjónsdóttir, a violinist. ‘My father loved resistance and challenge.’
With this temperament came a discipline that was all-consuming. Spur, who left her life in Denmark to marry Ólafsson and move to Iceland in 1956, gave him unbridled freedom to work, while frugally raising four children. Sigurjónsdóttir describes wearing handmade clothes and how her schoolfriends could not understand her unconventional father, who went out fishing for their food and crafted strange objects.
Ólafsson had enjoyed success in Denmark, where he studied and worked from 1928 until 1945 alongside contemporaries and collaborators such as Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pedersen and architect Finn Juhl. He was awarded the Eckerberg medal for portraiture in 1939 and completed a design for a ‘children’s house’ for the Tivoli Gardens (sadly unrealised).
Yet when he returned to Iceland after World War II, homesick for its dramatic landscapes, Ólafsson’s experimental abstract works were seen as challenging, in part due to the lack of a fine-art heritage here. Icelandic culture had been dominated by literature and craft; painting and sculpture did not become formal disciplines in the country until the turn of the century. Iceland’s first art school opened only in 1939, so prior to this, artists were forced to study abroad. When Iceland gained independence from Denmark in 1944, a new period of urban and cultural evolution began in Reykjavík, to which Ólafsson participated, contributing public works such as the 1966 relief for the Búrfell hydroelectric plant.
So, while pursuing abstract works in Icelandic dolerite stone, iron and later driftwood and found objects, the sculptor made a living out of producing Realist portraits of cultural leaders, painters, scholars and patrons in stone and bronze. He incisively captured both likeness and interior psychology through material choice and surface texture.
Dating from 1938, a bronze portrait of his mother, Guðrún Gisladottir, depicts a humble and hard-working labourer with a tenacious character – she thought it ‘sheer lunacy’ to be sculpted, Spur remarks – yet her image became a timeless ‘emblem of tough Icelandic women’. A group of these portraits are currently exhibited at the museum, curated carefully by Spur in the gallery to balance the complex power of each personality.
‘Sculptures are going to fight,’ she says, ‘and if they attack each other, you have to find another place for them.’ Yet while each personality radiates its own magnetic energy, perhaps it is Spur who holds the most strength in the room, as the stoic mediator between them all.
She credits her instinctual sensitivity to proportions to her upbringing spending time at church within a space defined by the golden ratio. ‘Experiences like that from a young age give you balance,’ she says. ‘It is natural for children to be open to three dimensions, because that's how they experience the world.’
At home, Spur balanced the enigmatic tension of Ólafsson’s sculptures with Danish furniture, including a Hans Wegner chair and her grandmother’s table. There were also folk art and textiles from Mexico, which she describes as ‘honest and efficient’. Overall, such elements created a modern atmosphere of vibrancy, warmth and calm.
As museum director, she has established a meticulous archive that is accessible to the public online, and has hosted popular children’s festivals and music concerts over the years. Sigurjónsdóttir, who has played her violin there many times, admires her mother’s ‘idealism and will to succeed’ in her leadership of the museum and its mission to share the legacy of 20th-century Icelandic modern sculpture.
In 2012, the Forundation Sigurjón Ólafsson Museum was donated to the Icelandic state and became a division of the National Gallery of Iceland. And in 2021, the running of the museum was leased for five years to Spur. Today, she wishes to find a path forward where the identity of the museum that she has built can continue: a place brought to life by musical notes and children’s creativity, and one that does not wish to hide the complexity and tension of life, as – for Ólafsson – that was the meaning of art.
Sigurjón Ólafsson Museum, Laugarnestangi 70, 105, 105 Reykjavík, Iceland. lso.is
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