i8 Gallery

This guide to i8 Gallery in Reykjavik traces its start in 1995, when Borkur Arnarson and his mother Edda Jonsdottir opened what they called a tiny hole in the wall on Ingolfsstraeti, at a time when Iceland had no commercial art gallery at all. It follows their first artist, Hreinn Fridfinnsson of the boundary-pushing 1960s group SUM, and the gamble of backing conceptual artists nobody was buying. Three decades on, the gallery relocated to its harborside address on Tryggvagata and grew to represent two dozen artists from across the world. Listen for how a bet nobody expected to pay off became one of Iceland's most internationally connected galleries.