At the heart of Eggert Pétursson’s (b. 1956) art lies the Arctic flora. Drawing on an intimate knowledge of Iceland’s plant life and volcanic landscapes, the artist invents compositions that are both botanically precise and phantasmagorical, earthly and otherworldly. Attuned to the scale of the tundra’s resilient flowers, mosses, and lichens, Pétursson opens entire universes in his paintings.
The exhibition title Millefleurs celebrates the abundance of floral splendor in Pétursson’s paintings, in nature, and in the decorative styles of art history. Pétursson’s works range from meticulously realistic depictions of plants, repeated like seemingly endless patterns on a canvas, to almost abstract compositions, where layered paint creates relief-like surfaces. His art is both timely and timeless: it resonates with contemporary ecological and posthumanist themes while his visually striking compositions connect to abstraction, formalism, and conceptual art.
Devoted to his subject since childhood and deeply rooted in local traditions, Pétursson is one of Iceland’s most beloved artists. The exhibition focuses primarily on works produced over the past 15 years, many of which haven’t been seen before in Finland. Of the 29 paintings on display, 25 are on loan from Icelandic private collections, while the remainder come from the collections of the National Gallery of Iceland, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Sara Hildén Art Museum, and Turku Art Museum. The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue presenting Pétursson’s work. It also features the documentary film Just Like a Painting by Eggert Pétursson (2020), directed by Gunnlaugur Þór Pálsson, which offers an intimate look at Pétursson’s artistic practice in dialogue with the Icelandic landscape.
Eggert Pétursson: Millefleurs has been produced in collaboration with the artist, Turku Art Museum, the National Gallery of Iceland, and i8 Gallery, and is curated by Selina Kiiskinen, Pari Stave, and Kari Immonen. After Turku, the exhibition will travel to the National Gallery of Iceland, where it will be on view from 7 November 2026 to 14 February 2027.
The exhibition is supported by the Finnish Heritage Agency.
Eggert Pétursson (b. 1956) lives and works in Reykjavík. He studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in Reykjavík from 1976 to 1979 and at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands, graduating in 1981. Although Pétursson is known for his distinctive way of depicting Icelandic flora, his artistic background lies in the Fluxus movement and conceptual art that dominated the 1960s and 1970s. He has had solo exhibitions in for instance the Living Art Museum, Reykjavík Art Museum, Hafnarborg, Nordatlantens Brygge, and Pori Art Museum. Pétursson has also illustrated Ágúst H. Bjarnason’s popular book on Icelandic flora, first published in 1983.
