Baldur Helgason

Baldur Helgason combines elements of caricature with oil painting and portraiture techniques inspired by portrait masters like John Singer Sargent. Most of Helgason’s works feature a mischievous cartoon man that serves as the artist’s avatar. Drawn in the style of classic animations like Felix the Cat and Betty Boop, the perpetually smiling everyman is both childlike and unsettlingly adult in his activities, as in the piece Etc. Etc. Etc. (Action Painting) (2020), where he is shown holding a lit cigarette in his comically oversized hand. Helgason’s works have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Amsterdam, and Reykjavik, and he had a market breakout in 2021 when his painting Portrait of a Man in a Trench Coat(2017) more than quadrupled its high estimate at auction, selling for $77,879.