http://www.brooklynrail.org/2016/06/artseen/louisa-matthiacuteasoacuteottirhildur-aacutesgeirsdoacutettir-jonsson
Louisa Matthíasdóttir/Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jonsson
Louisa Matthíasdóttir/Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jonsson
TIBOR DE NAGY GALLERY | MAY 5 – JUNE 17, 2016
Iceland has been
punching well above its weight in the cultural arena for the last twenty years.
With a population the size of Santa Ana, California, it has produced more than
its fair share of musicians, and artists, including the odd alt-pop diva. Tibor
de Nagy’s pairing of two artists from Iceland shows the country’s impact on
their sensibilities. At first blush, they seem quite different. Louisa
Matthíasdóttir (1917 – 2000), two generations older than Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir
Jonsson (b. 1963), made representational paintings whose geometric severity
borders on Cubism. Jonsson, an abstract fabric artist, bases her fluid, organic
forms on photographs of nature in her native country. Both artists, however
share a taste for vibrant hues and strong, simplified forms. What’s more, each,
in her own way, pays tribute to Iceland’s unique natural beauty—its mountains,
surreal volcanic outcroppings, and treeless vistas.I
Matthíasdóttir’s
career began in Iceland in the ’30s, where she established herself as a member
of its avant-garde scene. In the 1940s she moved to New York and studied with
Hans Hoffmann; she influenced fellow Hoffmann students (Jane Freilicher, Larry
Rivers, Robert de Niro, Sr., and others) to revive representational painting
from a perspective informed by Hoffmann’s theories on abstract art. In
Matthíasdóttir’s case, she expressed her synthesis of abstraction and
representation by dividing the picture plane into discrete sections of color,
as if she were creating a map.
In the current
exhibition, there are fifteen paintings from her mature period between the
1970s and 1990s. They are all paintings of Iceland, where she regularly
returned with her husband, the painter Leland Bell. Her surfaces, switching
freely between thick and thin passages, show a quick, decisive hand with little
evidence of pentimenti or erasures. The subjects alternate between scenes of
sheep grazing in the countryside, views of Reykjavik, and small seaside
villages. Her compositions work best where her abstract and representational
tendencies are in almost perfect balance. Icelandic Village (1991) shows a number of small buildings pitched at odd angles
by the ocean-side; Matthíasdóttir creates a strong effect in the way she
combines their shapes. The procession of brightly colored polygons, axes just
slightly off-kilter, makes for a jazzy polyrhythmic dance in the foreground.
She offsets all of this activity with the gently curving shoreline, and then
above that the flat horizon line of the ocean, which creates a foil for all the
energetic goings-on below. Reykjavik Harbor (1987) succeeds in much the same way: Matthíasdóttir makes a
nice contrast between the densely packed angular buildings in the foreground
and the graceful horseshoe of the seawall that seems to float above the city in
the distance. Mountain and Sheep (1989) has lyrical color passages of mountain peaks looming in
the distance, but it lacks the expressive tension of compression and expansion
in the two previous paintings.
Louisa
Matthíasdóttir, Reykjavik Harbor, 1987. Oil on canvas. 19 × 27 inches. Courtesy Tibor de
Nagy Gallery.
Jonsson’s fabrics
in this show are the same size as Matthíasdóttir’s easel paintings.
Unfortunately, the gallery could not include one of her larger works, which
make a great visual impact. She creates the shimmering images in her silk textiles
through a process similar to ikats. She organizes the warp (vertical) threads
on a loom, detaches them, and paints her image. After painting the threads, she
reattaches them to the loom and weaves in the weft (horizontal thread) to
create her fabric. In the process of weaving into the reattached warp, the
painted threads run ever so slightly off register, which accounts for the
shimmer. As the titles in this exhibit suggest, Jonsson based most of the
images on her close-up photographs of lichen formations. Yet the images
themselves have an indeterminate scale: they could also be aerial photographs
of islands off a seacoast. Lichen 2 (2016) has a rich palette of saffron-yellow patches on a
saturated burgundy-red background, a color pairing that occurs throughout this
series. Jonsson offsets the intensity in Lichen 2 and other pieces with light touches of other dyes, which
emphasizes their fluidity. Jonsson’s ability to work wet dyes into wet gives
her fabrics a painterly appeal that ikats lack, as they depend on resists to
create their patterns.
Hildur
Ásgeirsdóttir Jonsson, Lichen 2, 2016. Silk and dyes. 27 × 28
inches. Courtesy Tibor de Nagy Gallery.
One thread that
runs through both artists’ work is a strange, otherworldly beauty, which aptly
describes Iceland’s rural scenery. In Matthíasdóttir’s work, the influence of
that scenery is more obvious, as her paintings actually depict it. On a subtler
level, the sharp contrasts that she brings to her color and shapes also convey
the bleak, seductive rigor of the landscape. Like Matthíasdóttir, Jonsson
returns to Iceland every year for thematic inspiration. Apparently, she also
returns to reconnect with the land itself. There, everything, including the
very earth, which is located as it is on a tectonic boundary, is in a perpetual
state of becoming, flowing from one form to another. Flow also appears in
Matthíasdóttir’s work, where her compositions seem to follow a powerful lateral
pull created by the mountains, sea, and even the buildings on the landscape.
This is another thread, the pull of the Iceland’s natural world, at times
austere, at others times stunning, that weaves its way through the work of these
highly accomplished artists, binding them to their native land.
CONTRIBUTOR
