Ég er vel synd
Ragnhildur Jóhanns — Listasalur Mosfellsbæjar, 14 August – 11 September 2026

Eighteen works, eight oil paintings and ten watercolours, built around two bodies that keep turning into each other, the iris and the Atlantic salmon. Scales become petals. Petals become fins. The flower is a fish, and the other way round.

Both are creatures of transformation, and neither chooses it. The iris pushes up out of cold, dark ground. The salmon undergoes smoltification, losing its parr marks and remaking its own body in order to survive salt water. It doesn't decide to. It simply becomes something else, or it doesn't survive.

The artist's own hands recur throughout the works with irises growing out of open palms, fish swimming out from between fingers, hands hanging slack. In Icelandic, að fallast hendur means to have one's hands fall: to lose the will or the capacity to carry on. These are paintings about what happens after that point. Not transformation by force of will, but transformation that arrives in its absence.

The title comes, by a long detour, from Tyler, the Creator “I swim good, I'm Pisces” carried into Icelandic, where synd means both having swum and sin. Ég er vel synd says two things at once and refuses to choose between them. The pun exists only in Icelandic; it doesn't survive the crossing into English, which seems appropriate for a show about what is lost and gained in changing environments.