“If you don’t have art and theaters—and free speech—it’s no good to live there.” The man telling me this, Guðmundur Kristjánsson, isn’t a curator or painter. He’s the CEO of a seafood company, Brim, and our conversation occurred at Reykjavík’s harbor on Fisherman’s Day. I had just toured one of Brim’s vessels, where framed art hung in the passageways and cabins. Outside, families wandered the docks as live music played, and free fish soup was ladled into compostable cups.
“I see in all the small fishing villages where we have art, then there is a society,” Kristjánsson says. Brim is a sponsor of Reykjavík Arts Festival, a role the company’s CEO talks about as a civic responsibility. “We are supporting our community,” he says. “We’re just part of the society.”
Then he said something I carried with me through the rest of my weeklong trip. “Some artists can say in art or music or song what we would have to say in many words, but they can say it simply.”
Fishing vessels open for tours during Fishermen’s Day in Reykjavík’s harbor, with Harpa concert hall in the background.
Nature can easily swallow an Iceland itinerary. Hot springs and mud pots, large and small, bubble and boil. Steam slips out of the earth. The land changes color as you drive through it, black to green to purple with wild lupines, first planted in the 1940s to combat soil erosion. “It didn’t work,” my cab driver told me on the ride from the airport. “So now we have all these lupines, and people come to see them.”
I had been in Iceland only a few minutes, and already the landscape felt like a lesson in unintended beauty—in what can happen when something takes root, spreads, and becomes stranger and more beautiful than anyone planned. It’s easy to see why artists here continue following ideas beyond their expected forms and into truly vulnerable territory.
I had come for the 35th Reykjavík Arts Festival, a biennial celebration founded in 1969. The 2026 edition spread more than 60 events, many free, across 16 days, bringing them into museums, concert halls, former factories, churches, and greenhouses. The festival became my entry point into a larger question.
Musician Björk is hosting a major exhibition, Echolalia, at the National Gallery of Iceland in Reykjavík. It features three large-scale audiovisual works, and a new piece based on her forthcoming musical project.
Photo by VIÐAR LOGI
How does a country of just under 400,000 people produce so much art?
“You get an idea that you want to do, and you just do it somehow,” says Lára Sóley Jóhannsdóttir, the festival’s artistic director (a four-year appointment designed to keep new ideas moving through the festival). The island’s size helps. Artists know one another and slide between roles that stay separate elsewhere. “It makes us very versatile,” she says, “and a very strong community as well.” She also points to the dark winters, when people sing, tell stories, and work with their hands. “We’ve always needed to be creative just to survive,” she adds. One local told me in a hushed tone that the northern lights eventually become mundane. Imagine looking up and thinking, Oh, that again. When beauty that dramatic becomes ordinary, perhaps you find new ways to delight yourself.
During the week, I watched artists follow ideas with the certainty that the human urge to make art—and reveal something of themselves in the process—was reason enough.
“Every artist is like a fishing boat. Every artist is their own company, employing musicians, sound and lighting, designers, photographers.” —Arnfríður S. Valdimarsdóttir, Reykjavík’s Director Of Culture
At Harpa—the concert hall rising from Reykjavík’s harbor, its honeycomb-like glass façade inspired by Iceland’s basalt columns and taking on the hues of whatever the sky is doing: blue in the afternoon, gold at sunset, silvery at what I could only think to call night (even though the midnight sun had other ideas)—I heard Hildur Guðnadóttir (the Oscar- and Emmy-winning Icelandic composer behind Joker, Chernobyl, and Tár) perform in her home country for the first time in years. She drew sounds from the strings I didn’t know violins could make—eerie and looming, then soaring. A few nights later, Viibra, the seven-woman flute ensemble formed for Björk’s 2017 album Utopia, allowed the flute to become wild and unruly. The women moved in choreographed dance, like one ethereal creature. They huffed into their instruments and tossed their heads upward as the breathy sound rippled from one to the next. If Viibra is performing while you’re there, go. And, even without a ticket, Harpa is worth entering for a drink or dinner in its waterfront restaurant.
Hustle and Flow. FLOW is an exhibition at the National Museum of Iceland with selected works by 19th-century folk artist and philosopher Sölvi Helgason, who went by the pseudonym Sólon Íslandus.
Photo by IVAR BRYNJOLFSSON/NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ICELAND
At the National Gallery of Iceland, another must-visit venue, a temporary festival exhibit paired Björk’s emotionally raw music videos with a decade of masks by her longtime collaborator James Merry. Embroidered, bejeweled, wired, and sometimes cut and folded from a single sheet of metal, they seem caught mid-transformation—intricate and uncanny, growing from the face in forms that suggest moths, stingrays, and jellyfish. At the National Museum, Icelandic folk band Mógil turned the drawings and writings of misfit Sölvi Helgason, a 19th-century wandering artist, into an album, then performed it among his work. Here, ideas rarely stay where they started.
This freedom to create art has structure beneath it. Reykjavík grants residents, aged 6 to 18, an annual 75,000-króna Recreation Card that they can use to pay for arts education, and Jóhannsdóttir says nearly every Icelandic town has a music school. “It’s not necessarily about becoming a musician or becoming an artist,” she says. “It’s just learning to appreciate art.” Iceland’s Artists’ Salary Fund pays independent artists for time spent creating, while Reykjavík supports festivals, studios, venues, and museums, financially and otherwise. The city and national government split the Reykjavík Arts Festival’s core funding evenly. “We don’t interfere with artistic decisions,” says Arnfríður S. Valdimarsdóttir, Reykjavík’s director of culture. “We just fund.” If arts funding is questioned, Arnfríður frames it in a way Icelandic politicians understand. “Every artist is like a fishing boat,” she says. “Every artist is their own company, employing musicians, sound and lighting, designers, photographers.”
Like these overlapping roles, in Iceland, the artistic spirit spills into various sectors, connecting, enhancing, and beautifying everything it touches. Be sure to book a scent journey at Fischersund, the family-run perfumery tucked into a tiny downtown house built in 1875, once the home studio of Jónsi (of Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós), who also makes its perfumes. His sister, Lilja Birgisdóttir, poured us house-made schnapps—“Iceland medicine”—and paired each fragrance with the poem Jónsi wrote for it. We closed our eyes and inhaled stolen rhubarb, arctic angelica, wet moss, and hot asphalt. Downstairs, Jónsi’s “scent organ” holds hundreds of oils. For the festival, he and other musicians expanded the ritual into a concert for 800 people. Ambient music played behind a translucent screen while organic shapes oozed across it. We sprayed perfume on our wrists, then watched an enormous bouquet of branches and flowers appear on stage. Drenched in fragrance, it was carried through the audience, glowing from a light source I never could understand. It was completely Icelandic, both dreamy and wonderfully strange. Before I left Fischersund, I bought a bottle of Útilykt, named for the scent that clings to your hair and clothes after you’ve been outside in the land of fire and ice.
Dream daze. Horses grazing near Laugarás Lagoon.
Photo by BESSI GAUTUR FRIÐÞJÓFSSON
A few more places to see in and around Reykjavík include Reykjavík Art Museum’s Hafnarhús, set in a former warehouse, and Marshall House (an old herring factory), home to the artist-run Living Art Museum and La Primavera, a lovely spot for dinner. World-renowned Icelandic artist Ólafur Elíasson is primarily based in Berlin, but he maintains a satellite studio at Marshall House. Farther from the city center, visit Ystasel 37 and the 1921 Elliðaárstöð power station. A few sculptures by Hallsteinn Sigurðsson stand at his former home at Ystasel, and during the festival, dancers and circus artists took over Elliðaárstöð beside the river. Each place made me want to stay longer.
Laxey Salmon Crudo from Laugarás Lagoon’s onsite restaurant, Ylja.
Photo by HLIN ARNGRIMSDOTTIR
Iceland’s comfort with vulnerability extends beyond art. Public pools and lagoons are part of daily life; some locals told me they go every day, and no one I asked went less than once a week. One woman said her mother goes as much to talk to people—even the repairman—as to swim. Colleagues, families, and strangers enter the warm water together, and without phones, conversation comes easily. Skip the touristy Blue Lagoon for a pool or smaller lagoon. At Laugarás Lagoon, we waded, sipped beers, and looked out over the Hvítá River. Eat first at Ylja, where I had one of the best meals of my life, made with local fish and geothermal-grown tomatoes, then stay until you forget what time it is.
As I write this, the bottle of Útilykt sits beside me, and when I spray it, I’m back in Iceland—Harpa changing with the light, a creature of branches moving through the theater, and Guðmundur Kristjánsson telling me art makes a place better to live.
An airport magnet has never done that for me.