Hallgrímur Helgason

Biography

In the winter of 1985–86 a twenty-six-year-old Icelander showed his paintings at the Bromfield Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston. A floor or two above, the artists of the Stux Gallery worked in the same building, among them the twin brothers Doug and Mike Starn, whom he met there.

Hallgrímur Helgason was born on 18 February 1959 in Reykjavík. His father was an engineer who headed the Icelandic Road Administration; his mother was a kindergarten teacher.

His art education was short: in 1980–81 he studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, and in 1981–82 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He was satisfied with neither and began to paint on his own. His subjects were colourful, “beautiful” Icelandic landscapes, which ran against the fashion of the day for conceptual and minimal art. He later described the Munich winter in the novel “Seasick in Munich” (2015), calling it the hardest winter of his life. The book is mostly an argument with the greats of the past, above all Marcel Duchamp and his “Large Glass”. After several solo shows in Reykjavík and a trip to Boston, he lived in New York from 1986 to 1989. There he painted and drew and showed his work at the Hal Bromm Gallery and the Stux Gallery; his success was moderate. To earn money he began sending weekly columns about life in New York to an Icelandic newspaper and made a programme for Icelandic State Radio, “Radio Manhattan”: he recorded his impressions of the streets around his home in Hell’s Kitchen and shipped the cassettes north. The response encouraged him to take a break from painting and try to write a novel. The subjects of his paintings shifted at that time from landscape to figures, stylised in the manner of Keith Haring.

His first novel, “Hella”, came out in 1990. It is set in a village of that name in southern Iceland, and the narration is deliberately dry, with no description of the characters’ feelings. Critics received the book coolly, and it sold modestly.

From 1990 to 1995 Helgason lived in Paris, painting and writing. Gradually his own style emerged, at once realistic and cartoonish: the figures stand in the middle of the canvas and the background is left white. In the early 1990s he had two solo exhibitions, at Galerie Alain Gutharc and Galerie Philippe Rizzo. There he also wrote his second novel, “Things Are Going Great” (1994), an ironic story of an untalented “famous” actress and musician. The book became a local hit, and in 2004 the National Theatre of Iceland staged it, directed by Baltasar Kormákur.

In the autumn of 1995, living in Park Slope in Brooklyn, he wrote “101 Reykjavík”. The title comes from the postal code of central Reykjavík. The novel is narrated in the first person by an unemployed man, Hlynur Björn, who lives with his mother and hardly ever leaves the city centre. In Iceland the book first got bad reviews and sold poorly, but after the prizes won by the film at several festivals it found an international readership. In 1999 Iceland nominated it for the Nordic Council Literature Prize; it has been translated into 14 languages. Kormákur’s film came out in 2000, with Hilmir Snær Guðnason and Victoria Abril in the leading roles.

Since 1996 Helgason has lived in Reykjavík again. In 1998 came a collection of poems, “Collected Poems 1978–1998”, written in the manner of nineteenth-century Icelandic rhyming verse, with jokes and a nod to American rap. The novel “The Author of Iceland” (2001) caused a scandal: its hero was modelled on Halldór Laxness, and the old left-wing elite considered it unacceptable to write about his communist past. The book won the Icelandic Literary Prize for 2001.

From 1995 he also developed a cartoon alter ego called Grim, a cross between Dracula and Pinocchio, with a long nose and fangs: through him the artist portrayed a writer who sucks blood out of real people’s lives and then makes up stories about them. The catalogue “Best of Grim” was published in Iceland in 2004, and in 2005 the publisher Actes Sud brought out “Les Contes de Grim” in France.

In 2008 came the novel “The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning”, the only one he wrote in English, and in 2011 “The Thousand Degree Woman” (published in some countries as “Woman at 1000°”), based on the life of a real woman, a granddaughter of Iceland’s first president, Sveinn Björnsson. Russian translations of both books were published by AST in its Corpus series.

In 2012 Helgason picked up the brush again. In September 2013 the Tveir hrafnar gallery in Reykjavík showed his black-and-white portraits of Icelandic writers of the first half of the twentieth century; Douglas Coupland wrote about the show in Artforum. In 2015 came the exhibition “Acrylic on Darkness I”, night views of Reykjavík suburbs with barely visible cars parked outside houses. The same year, at the group show “Just Painted 2” at the Reykjavík Art Museum, he showed a large portrait of Jón Gnarr, the comedian who became mayor, with a family of eight in which every member was played by Gnarr. In all, he has held more than thirty solo exhibitions in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark and France.

The “Sixty Kilos” trilogy tells of a fictional town, Segulfjörður, in the north of Iceland during the herring boom. The first book, “Sixty Kilos of Sunshine”, won the Icelandic Literary Prize, and the second, “Sixty Kilos of Knockouts”, in 2021. The third part appeared in 2024.