BIOEFFECT x Katrin Fridriks

For our 2026 holiday gift sets, we collaborated with acclaimed Icelandic abstract painter Katrin Fridriks, bringing her unmistakable artistic expression to this year’s limited-edition collection.

by Philipe Servent

Katrin Fridriks.

Known for her highly physical and expressive approach to abstract painting, Fridriks explores movement, matter and transformation. Her work turns to the visible and invisible forces that shape our relationship with the natural world.

Fridriks has made her mark on the international art scene, exhibiting her work worldwide, including at the Venice Biennale at Palazzo Bembo, Kjarval Museum and Liverpool Biennial, with her works also held in numerous public and private collections. Among her many special commissions and collaborations are projects for Bentley’s 100th anniversary during Frieze London and a book cover for an award-winning book by Mark Miodownik, published by Penguin.

In a recent conversation about her artistic practice and collaboration with BIOEFFECT, Fridriks reflected on her relationship with Iceland, the meeting point between art and science, and the ideas behind the three distinct color fields that shape this year’s holiday gift sets.

Distance, Movement and Memory.

Born in Reykjavík and raised largely abroad, Fridriks has spent most of her life outside Iceland, living across Luxembourg, Germany, France, Belgium and the United States. Growing up between different cultures, languages and artistic environments broadened her perspective and gave her a new understanding of her connection to Iceland.

“Living abroad gave me both distance and expansion. Iceland remains my foundation, while the cultures, places and ideas I encountered forged my artistic identity and shaped my visual language.” With distance, Iceland has become less a physical place than something carried within her, an ancestral memory shaped by water, stone, geological movement, extreme weather and vast forms of energy. "Perhaps landscape itself can become a form of memory passed through generations. I feel that memory within my gesture. It is less about depicting Iceland, it's more carrying its frequency."

Iceland’s raw and unpredictable natural forces continue to inform her artistic practice. Rather than depicting the landscape itself, she is drawn to the movement and energy within it.

“Iceland taught me movement, unpredictability, force, and rhythm.”

That sense of movement is fundamental to her physical process. Working with liquid materials, she composes each gesture with precision, considering distance, speed, angle and timing, yet an element of spontaneity remains. Over time, this connection has expanded beyond Iceland itself. While the country remains a point of origin, Fridriks’ work explores broader questions of matter, consciousness and our relationship with the living world.

Where Art and Science Meet.

Fridriks’s artistic practice moves between the physical and the intangible, a perspective that also informs her fascination with science. “Both art and science begin with curiosity. I am fascinated by how matter organizes itself, how information travels, how patterns emerge, and how invisible forces become physical form.”

For Fridriks, science and art offer different ways of exploring the same phenomena: one through investigation and the other through intuitive experience. “For me, the fascinating territory is where the two meet: matter, perception, mathematics and consciousness.” This overlap also gave Fridriks a natural point of entry into the collaboration with BIOEFFECT. As she explains, “Their work explores regeneration beneath the visible surface of the skin, while my paintings explore invisible forces becoming visible through matter.”

When we first approached Fridriks about collaborating on the 2026 holiday gift sets, she was drawn to the creative freedom of the project, our previous artist collaborations and the energy of our team. "There was an immediate connection." Central to that connection was their shared Icelandic origin. While BIOEFFECT draws on this heritage through science, nature and innovation, Fridriks interprets it through gesture, matter and movement.

“We speak different languages, but we carry the same Icelandic pulse.”

Three Realms, Three Frequencies.

The artwork across the 2026 holiday gift sets moves through three distinct color fields: silver, green and blue. While all three come from a single original work, Fridriks sees them as "three realms, distinct dimensions of frequency that coexist and communicate with one another." Each carries its own meaning within her artistic world. Silver represents collective consciousness, reflection and awareness; green represents Mother Earth, biological life and renewal; and blue represents water memory, depth and transmission.

The color fields originate in the conceptual universe of Fridriks’s series A Certain Blue Enters Your Soul, rooted in her exploration of consciousness and experiences beyond the physical. Within the BIOEFFECT collaboration, these existing ideas took on a new meaning around regeneration and renewal.

“They felt right for BIOEFFECT because together they could form a new work around regeneration, not simply biological regeneration, but renewal understood through matter, nature and consciousness.”

From Canvas to Something Held and Shared.

Fridriks’s work is typically experienced on a much larger scale, making its translation onto the holiday gift sets a new way for the artwork to move beyond the canvas and into people’s lives, continuing its movement in a new form as it passes from one person to another through the art of gifting.

Asked how it felt to see her work translated onto the gift sets, Fridriks says: "I love it. A fragment of a painting leaves my studio, travels into another person's life and becomes part of an exchange between people."