“An artist’s archive is inevitably personal; an unedited history hidden away and tucked between the pages of an otherwise organized order of things. Unfinished or incomplete ideas hinting towards the ongoing process of creativity surface in the immediacy of the material and the mark of the artist´s accidental habits and gestures. Access to this intimate parallel allows our own imaginations to run wild in the freedom of Ólafur´s world. In the process it becomes possible to continue history by adding footnotes and rearrangement. The things left behind become moments anew. The past is pulled into the present. And the black and white recording is seen in colour again.

Wandering through the material has been a joint venture with the artist that has stood us alongside those audience members in 1978. The relevancy of his works and archival memory have enabled us to gaze upon Ólafur as he stood where the grass grew, or collaborated with the wild Arctic Terns. When he somersaulted “out and about in the mountains”, and buried his head under the moss-covered landscape, crashed through the glass, and rolled himself up in dandelions, paint and smoke with the dead-end rainbow. In his endless curiosity, sentimentality and unshakable romance with nature and his environment, his view through the lens, the ritualism, and his resonating lightness, humor and adventure. Sorting through the piles that assemble the Ólafur Lárusson Archive has been full of echoing black and white rainbows and moments of dust sparkles glittering gold in the passed and blazing sunlight.”