---

Exhibition: On Serenity
Artist: Jakob Veigar
Opening Speech: Dr. Renée Gadsden
Period: October 8 – November 5, 2026

---

What happens when we become quiet enough to notice what is already there?

In On Serenity – Our Fragile Nature and the Unseen Landscape, Jakob Veigar Sigurðsson brings together paintings that explore the fragile territory between the landscape around us and the landscape within us.

Born in Iceland and based in Vienna, Sigurðsson works across painting, performance and film. Landscape has always been present in his practice, but rarely as something to be represented literally. Instead, it becomes a space for memory, uncertainty, transformation and imagination.

There is another landscape beneath the visible one: a landscape shaped by what has disappeared, what we remember, what we fear, and what we hope might still become possible.

This idea has become increasingly important in Sigurðsson’s recent practice. In 2025, he created Burning Bridges, a 24-hour performance beneath Skeiðarárbrú in southern Iceland. The bridge once crossed the powerful glacial river Skeiðará. As the glacier retreated and the landscape changed, the river disappeared from beneath it, leaving the bridge spanning an absence.

For twenty-four hours, Sigurðsson walked the bridge and tended seventeen fires. The act became a vigil for something that was no longer there — but also an encounter with endurance, change and the strange beauty of accepting that nothing remains as it is.

The works in On Serenity emerge from a similar territory.

Their surfaces accumulate, dissolve and reappear. Forms hover between abstraction and landscape. Rather than offering a fixed image, the paintings invite the viewer to remain within uncertainty — to look without immediately needing to understand.

Here, serenity does not mean escaping the instability of the world.

It means learning to exist within it.

Our landscapes are fragile. So are our bodies, our memories, our relationships and the stories we tell ourselves about permanence. Everything we know is changing, including us.

But fragility does not only mean loss.

It can also create attention.

In the moment when certainty disappears, another landscape can become visible: one made from memory, imagination and possibilities.

Perhaps serenity begins there — not in knowing what comes next, but in accepting that we do not know, and still choosing to look forward.