Timepiece: 2007

Originally published in Mslexia 107 (Autumn 2025), p. 20.

Shortly after I settled in Iceland in 2007, the oils dried on what was then the nation’s most expensive painting ever sold. But it was purchased two years before: the ‘unpainted painting by Hallgrímur Helgason’ was a coveted item at a high-profile charity auction, an event fuelled by champagne and the posturing of entrepreneurs. Helgason, notorious for his unfettered political commentary as well as his satirical artwork, was repulsed by such egregious extravagance; he was reluctant to touch the blank canvas. Finally, however, he produced God on Sæbraut, portraying a corpulent Mammon in a horse-drawn carriage held at a red light near Reykjavík’s financial district. Dark rolling clouds, photorealistic behind the grisaille and ghastly figures, loom ominously over the landscape along the bay.

So this was the landscape I’d entered.

I admired Iceland’s rugged wilderness, but my scene was the city. Attending as many gallery openings as I could, networking with every artist, curator and dealer I met, I gobbled up the jobs that began streaming in. I had to hustle, but it truly seemed a land of plenty.

Then, just after America’s subprime mortgages triggered a global liquidity crisis, Iceland’s economy was swept out to sea.

Debts amassed by the banks had swelled to ten times the GDP. This nation had been, only recently, amongst Europe’s poorest, but when I first called it home, it was one of the world’s richest. ‘In retrospect,’ I write from London nearly two decades later, in a translator’s note in Helgason’s retrospective exhibition catalogue, ‘the factors behind the financial collapse were both patently clear and unforgivable.’ But everyone had enjoyed the material comforts of debt-propelled growth. Ah, she’s vintage 2007, became the joke about me: for I, too, had been hypnotised by iridescent promises shimmering on the surface of that economic soap bubble.