On The Far Horizon

Guðbjörg Lind Jónsdóttir is dealing in her works with an old subject in anew way: how motion becomes stasis and time still-life. A long process lies behind the production of each work, and the time from starting it and stopping takes months. Which is one way to make time of the still-life visible, almost tangible.

Jónsdóttir´s treats landscape in a purely subjective manner, fictionalizing her prototypes onto the canvas. The foaming white waterfalls plunging vertically down the sheer canvas are not representational portraits of specific waterfalls; and despite the artist´s daily evening rambles along the shores of the bay north of Reykjavik, her islands and skerries on the choppy white surface of the ocean are an invention, arranged onto the canvas with the same meticulousness of pictorial construction as the crockery on the white cloth of her table scenes.

Jónsdóttir´s interest is directed not least towards experiments with the tangibility and material effect of light. Besides the white colour of her waterfalls, seascapes and tablecloths, her palette is mainly characterised by silky-soft hazy hues: grey tones, bluish-black, brown and green. An unusual point of view, resulting in part from her Jónsdóttir´s frequent positioning of the line of vision high up on the pictorial surface, is one of the main characteristics of her works. This point of view probably also represents their greatest abstraction.

Her works are based to a large extent on vertical and horizontal surfaces and diverse interaction between them. The shape of the pictorial surface is also a decisive factor. An example of the vertical construction is the waterfall pictures where a white streak of light in the middle of the picture dissects the dark surface. By constricting the point of view and erasing all details, the artist can be said to lead the spectator into the waterfall. The constriction of the subject invites a reference to the artist´s roots in Iceland´s West Fjords, where the land is confined and the view limited, but the mountains are high by the same token, with a slender rim of sky above them.

Auður Ólafsdóttir Art director
The Icelandic University Art Museum