i8 Gallery

About the Gallery
Over its thirty-year history, i8 Gallery has fostered an influential group of artists from its Reykjavík base. The foundation of i8 Gallery is the conceptual rigor and intellectual spirit of its artists’ practices, which subtly unites the diverse roster. The twenty-three artists of the gallery work in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, painting, drawing, video, textile, installation, and performance.

i8 Gallery, founded in 1995 by Edda Jónsdóttir and her son Börkur Arnarson, draws its name from its original address at Ingólfstræti 8. The gallery moved to its current location near Reykjavík Harbor in 2010, across from the Reykjavík Art Museum. In 2022, i8 opened i8 Grandi, the gallery’s second location in Reykjavík that focuses on year-long, single-artist exhibitions. Located in the Marshall House, a cultural centre in a historic factory building in Reykjavík's Grandi harbour district, i8 Grandi shares a building with the Living Art Museum, Kling & Bang, and artist Ólafur Elíasson’s private studio.

About the Presentation
i8 Gallery will present new paintings by Tokyo-based artist Yui Yaegashi (b. 1985, Japan) in a solo presentation at Independent.

Yui Yaegashi’s oil paintings are rooted in precision, with her distinct style of patterning resulting in reductive, layered works. Yaegashi maintains a rigorous daily dedication to painting, allowing for a continuity that spans her practice. She paints multiple works over the same period, fluidly working between paintings. Yaegashi’s compositions are carefully composed, with a focus on graphic lines, veiled strokes of paint, surface textures, and explorations of both symmetry and asymmetry. The artist has a systematic approach to painting, working in her signature small format and often limiting colour palettes. While precise, the paintings intentionally include elements of imperfection, which interrupt the restraint inherent to the artist’s approach and highlight the nuances of her compositions.