Considerable
2017

A catalogue for the exhibition Considerable held at the LÁ Art Museum from October 23d to Desember 17th November 13th to January 24th 2016.

It exhibits works by: Brynhildur Þorgeirsdóttir and Guðrún Tryggvadóttir.
Curator: Inga Jónsdóttir, museum director.
Text in catalogue: Heiðar Kári Rannversson, independent researcher and curator.

In the exhibition Considerable, Brynhildur Thorgeirsdóttir and Guðrún Tryggvadóttir at the LÁ Art Museum, the focus is on the extensive artistic careers of Guðrún Tryggvadóttir and Brynhildur Thorgeirsdóttir, which span nearly four decades. The show brings works made in recent years together with others from Guðrún and Brynhildur's early years in art: each held her first solo show in the early 1980s. The exhibition provides an insight into the evolution of the two artists' works, while also demonstrating that their art has reflected a consistent visual world from the outset.

The exhibition comprises two separate but connected elements. The artists' older works, displayed in the Gallery 4, express the Zeitgeist of the 1980s, where form and content manifest attitudes opposed to the conventional art of the time. The ideology behind Guðrún and Brynhildur's work at the time has links to the slogan of Punk: Do it Yourself. But unlike Punk, which has long been a slave to fashion, Guðrún and Brynhildur have always been consistent. The observer sees this when standing before the more recent works in the two largest galleries, as well as in the foyer and in front of the Museum building. These show how the artists' attitudes to life and art have enabled them to create a very personal oeuvre, unlike anything else in Iceland.

Brynhildur and Guðrún both have personal ties to the county of Árnessýsla. Brynhildur was born and brought up on the farm Hrafnkelsstaðir, while Guðrún has family roots in the county and has lived for some time in Hveragerði and Ölfus district. But that is not all they have in common: both studied at the College of Arts and Crafts (forerunner of the Iceland Academy of the Arts), then continued their studies abroad. Guðrún studied at the École Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, graduating in painting and printmaking in 1983, when she was awarded the Debütanten prize as the best of her graduating class. Brynhildur studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and later at the National School of Glass in Örrefors, Sweden. She then crossed the Atlantic to pursue further study at the California Collega of Arts and Crafts and the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State. After completing her studies in 1982, Brynhildur spent some years in Iceland before going back to the USA, where she lived in New York until 1990. Guðrún too returned to Iceland after graduation, and after a year in Berlin she also went to the USA, to Cleveland, where she lived until 1992. She lived in Iceland for a year, then moved to Germany. At the beginning of this century Guðrún returned to live in Iceland.

An indistinct memory of attitude
The first time that Guðrún's and Brynhildur's work was seen together was at the outset of their careers, in the exhibition Gullströndin andar/Breath of the Gold Coast in Reykjavík early in 1983. The show was held in the Jötunn building, where they and other artists had studio space; the building had been leased the previous year on Brynhildur´s initiative, while Guðrún lived and worked there for one winter. That landmark exhibition presented the leading ideas of contemporary artists in the early 1980s: the formal character and means of painting and sculpture were radically deconstructed by a new generation of artists. With this show Guðrún and Brynhildur may be said to have introduced into Iceland new trends in art: they had both recentlly completed many years of study abroad and they were both responsible, along with other artists, for the organisation and installation of the show. But they may also be said to have set off trom the Gold Coast on a journey to explore new lands – as both went abroad again, and remained there throughout the 80s and into the 90s, practising their art.

The first time I saw Guðrún's and Brynhildur's art was many years later, and separately. I had first becom acquainted with their work through photographs in catalogues – as I was only a few months old when they first showed their work together. The Gold Coast is an exotic place veiled a mystical aura. The idea of the pictures sparks an indistinct memory of “attitude“, that persists long after the works have vanished from view.

Woman on rock
The work by Guðrún Tryggvadóttir that I first remember seeing is not a painting – which has been her preferred medium for a long time – but a photograph. I recall a black-and-white portrait of a woman on a rock. She displays her naked body among rocks on the seashore, her upper body twisted so that her face is turned away from the camera. The image should more accurately be called a “pose“, as the from of her entire body is the subject. A photograph can equally well be a frame from a film; and I remember imagining that in a moment the woman would start to move, shove at the rocks or climb over them. There is attitude in the work – in the sense of the artist's posture in the photograph, the physical expression entailed by the curve of the body. A step in an expressionistic dance. But the word attitude may also be taken to refer to the attitude to the photograph itself, that makes the artist's body the subject and theme of art. In the work the observer is able to see the artist in close-up – quite literally – and that is precisely a characteristic feature of Guðrún's art – as manifested in other works in this exhibition. Another attribute of her art is also seen  her: her delicate sensibility for tension and composition in the picture plane.

I later learned that the photograph had been taken by the Hudson River in Inwood Hill Park in New York, where Guðrún spent the summer of 1982. It was published in a catalogue accompanying her degree show at the Akademie der Bildenen Künste in Munich the following year. It is a part of a larger work in which the artist used Inwood Hill as the setting for installations and performance art: among other things she painted on rocks along the shore and on newspapers, some of which were displayed like paintings. The photograph is thus a standalone work, while also being a documentation of a performance and an ephemeral installation.

Among the older works in the exhibition, fragments of Guðrún's multi-layered work are seen: the works, in the collection of the National Gallery of Iceland, use newspapers as the material plane of the painting, while the content of the newspapers also becomes a part of the subject. Two older photographic works are also seen in which the artist's body is the subject. In one the artist has been “standardised“ and divided up according to internationally recognised DIN norms (Deutsche Industrie Normen) – which apply, for instance, to paper sizes. Birthmarks on Guðrún's body are assigned an undefined significance in the work, which is a minute examination of the artist, while also being a trenchant critique of the systems which seek to circumscribe us. In DESTRUCTION, from Guðrún's first solo show in Iceland, the artist has cut that word into her arm and photographed it – one letter per day. The photographs show how the cuts which inscribe the word on her body heal and fade as the work progresses, thus erasing the meaning of the word destruction. Destruction is also its opposite, creation – in this case seen as the organic process of healing skin.

More recent works by Guðrún in the exhibition also address ideas about organic processes – whether in a person or in nature, and the possible links between them. Large series of paintings by tha artist made in recent years convey the artist's complex ideas about what may be called lifespan; the series Bloodline, for instance, focuses on her relationship with her foremothers. Here the observer senses the progress of time not only in how the painting has been made on the canvas. This becomes clear in the artist's latest works, which are close to abstract expressionism. The works, Fourth Dimension, The Foundation of Everything and All is the Same, are of huge size and powerfully painted, so that the artist's physical exertion in making the painting becomes almost tangible. Her movements can be traced across the space of the canvas. As seen in the most recent part of the exhibition, Guðrún applies different techniques in every picture – as each new idea calls for a new method, in the artist's view. Overall, however, a consistency emerges between chaos and balance – a view of art as an ongoing life-or-death-process

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Latitude – Attitude
A visitor who stands before the works of Brynhildur Thorgeirsdóttir and Guðún Tryggvadóttir in the exhibition Considerable at the LÁ Art Museum will observe that from the outset the two artists have been consistent in their art. As implied by the title of the exhibition, and as discussed above, each has had a considerable career, in many senses. Not only has each produced a considerable oeuve; many of their works are also considerable in scope, as we see in the exhibition. Their works are readily-identifiable and personal in nature. Here we see creature and beings on the boarderline between figurative and abstract that emerge from the artists' unique visual worlds – as well as their sense of self. During their careers Guðrún and Brynhildur have never done as they were told. It is this attitude – to adobt a stance and an attitude – that makes their art well worthy of consideration