Ürügüdd (hringur)

Egill Sæbjörnsson is an Icelandic contemporary artist who lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Department of Multimedia at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 1997 and has consistently worked across a wide range of media, from pop music to multimedia installations and sculpture. Egill creates constructed worlds or immersive installations in which he combines drawing, sculpture, video, sound, digital technology, interactivity, and artificial intelligence. His works are rich in imagination, humour, and playful creativity, populated by fictional characters that emerge in various forms—sometimes as trolls, sometimes as constantly talking stones. In this way, he draws the viewer into an artistic universe where creativity and playfulness are all-encompassing.

Character creation is a central thread in Egill’s practice. In 2008, he encountered a Norwegian troll figurine with a long, narrow nose perched on a shelf in a shop at Oslo Airport. The figurine caught his attention as an amusing cliché of the idea of a troll, and soon afterwards he began making numerous drawings and clay sculptures of trolls. These gradually evolved into the trolls Úr and Búr (Ūgh and Bõögâr). Over time, Úr and Búr became Egill’s imagined collaborators, and in 2017 he invited them to exhibit alongside him at the Venice Biennale. There, Egill presented an exhibition of artworks by himself and the trolls alike. Through this approach, he places himself within the mindset of a child, where the boundaries between reality and imagination blur. Since then, the trolls have created, exhibited, and travelled with Egill around the world. At first glance, they may appear to be descended from Icelandic folklore, but on closer inspection they could just as easily be products of contemporary consumer culture.

The Troll Ring came into being when Úr and Búr began making their own gold jewellery in Egill’s studio—both to admire and to adorn themselves with. Because trolls have large fingers and struggle with fine precision, the rings became rather oversized and clumsy. With care and patience, Egill and the trolls produced more than one hundred gold rings, which have since been exhibited in art museums and galleries around the world. Trolls, however, have a tendency to get carried away by their own playfulness, and when the gold jewellery was shown at the National Gallery of Iceland, Úr and Búr became exceedingly proud and self-satisfied. Egill must therefore constantly remind the trolls to practise greater restraint and empathy.