2018Islensk Myndlist IX – SUM - First Day Cover

The SÚM-group came into being in Reykjavík in the mid- Sixties and remained active well into the 1970s. The group may be regarded as the first consciously disruptive movement in Icelandic art, aiming its barbs at two local trends, landscape painting on the one hand and abstraction on the other. The SÚM artists themselves were a diverse bunch, many of them largely self-taught. SÚM artistic expression is partly borne out of the social and cultural turmoil of the late Fifties and early Sixties, not least the manifold challenges to the moral values of Western culture. A new generation of Icelandic artists was introduced to many of these ideas through Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth, who lived in Iceland for a time.