Birgir Andrésson: Africa

How do we describe a color?

For Birgir Andrésson, color was never simply something we see. Born to blind parents in the Westman Islands off the southern coast of Iceland, he grew up in a world where color existed first as language – something spoken, named, and imagined.

When Andrésson came across a German guide of standardized color codes, he was struck by its foreign tone: rational, orderly, and therefore unmistakably German. The realization was absurd yet revealing: How could a system of color, something supposedly neutral, seem to belong to a nation at all? If a nation could have its own language, why not its own palette? Where does neutrality end and belonging begin? In response, he imagined a system of his own – a fictional catalog of Icelandic Colors. Using the same rigid logic of numbers and codes, his colors became cultural inventions: intimate and bureaucratic, calmly destabilizing.

In Africa, Andrésson applies his invented system of Icelandic Colors to a series of monochrome panels, each bearing the name of an African nation. The gesture is both deliberate and unsettling. He is not depicting Africa, but revealing the structures of representation itself. By assigning Icelandic colors to African countries, Andrésson exposes how color – like language – can be used to define, to classify, and to claim ownership. The work becomes a conceptual mirror: it reflects not Africa, but the act of naming it – and the long history of how Europe has “colored” the world in maps, language, and imagination.

In the wall painting An Hour (2006), Andrésson gives time a chromatic identity: “ICELANDIC 7020-B10G, ICELANDIC 3030-B.” Like a bureaucratic record of something fleeting, the codes attempt to measure what cannot be held, the color of a duration, a moment suspended in language.

Across his practice, Andrésson treated color as a cultural code – linguistic, political, and deeply human; something we inherit as much as we invent. Through the quiet precision of his surfaces, he asks us to look again: If every color carries a name, and every name a history – whose vision are we really seeing through?