Atli Viðar Engilbertsson

Atli was born in 1961 on a farm in the West Fjords, and in 1987 moved with his family to the village of Hólmavík. In 2000 Atli moved to Akureyri, the main town of north Iceland, where he lives today. He has worked on farms, in a freezingplant and in construction, and in recent years he has been working on his art. In his teens he started to make shoes of macramé using nylon rope and fishingnet yarn. He has made collages, written short stories of which he sold photocopies, written a rock song for an al- bum, Húsið, and taken part in N-ART, an exhibition in Reykjavík by Nordic mixed media artists. His work has been shown at the Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum, the Hrafnagil Crafts Exhibition, Hafnarborg – the Hafnarfjörður Centre of Culture and Fine Art, and in an international textile exhibition at the Reykjavík Art Museum in 2004.

Atli has developed a personal style in which he reuses materials and makes works inspired by fashion collections. He has also made a number of male and female figures of corrugated paper, which have attracted much attention. Atli Viðar writes in the press, composes music and plays guitar, bass and drums. In 2013 he was selected Artist of the Festival at Art without Borders, and at about the same time his play The Shirts was staged at the Freyvangur Theatre in Eyjafjörður. Works by Atli have been showcased at the Icelandic Folk and Outsider Art Museum, and were among the pieces from the Museum’s collection exhibited in 2013 at the Korundi Museum in Rovaniemi, Finland.