past Exhibition
 

Haraldur Jónsson, John Zurier, Kees Visser, Páll Haukur, Þorgerður Þórhallsdóttir
#currentmood

 

November 3 – December 22, 2017

 
Haraldur Jónsson (b. 1961) studied at various art schools and academies in Iceland, France, and Germany. He has exhibited since the late 1980s and his output is remarkably varied. His art refers back to the core ideas of the twentieth-century avant-garde and is expressed in a wide range of materials and forms of presentation. His different approaches demonstrate much versatility, yet his work always has an unmistakable personal character. Many of his creations are conceived to transform the viewer’s perception of the material. He has produced sculptures that evoke the experience of silence or absence, drawings that deliberately eschew any representation or coherent composition, installations of industrial materials that defy function, and lists of words that refer to human emotions, presented as wallpaper, confounding the distinction between our inner and outer experience. He consistently strives to make visible that which is normally hidden and to give form to that which normally has no dimension or form.

John Zurier (b.1956) paints abstract paintings in which the colour and surface invoke the atmosphere and mood of places and times – seen and unseen, past and future. The paintings offer a maximal sense of colour, light, and space with simple and direct means. His works have a great physicality that derives from his interest in the material qualities of both paint and support. He works with both oil paint and glue-size tempera (also known as distemper) on a wide range of linen grounds, and also with watercolour on paper. His work has been included in major exhibitions such as The Whitney Biennial (2002), The Gwangju Biennial (2008) in South Korea, and the São Paulo Biennial (2012). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010.

Kees Visser (b. 1948) left his native Holland in the 1970s and settled in Iceland where he continues to spend part of his time while also residing in the Netherlands and in France. In Iceland he became part of the cosmopolitan art scene with its strong focus on Fluxus, minimalism and conceptual art. Visser’s own work has long combined these influences in works that emphasise abstraction and serial presentation, focusing on colour theory and the exploration of spatial forms and representations. His various sculptural works use colour series in combination with a variety of shapes and materials, sometimes referring to practical constructions and common objects. His works on paper, however, tend to be more purely abstract, often using monochrome colour fields and overpainting to achieve deep but subtle colour effects with a textured, crystalline surface. Kees Visser’s work has been widely exhibited worldwide in addition to being in numerous international private and public collections.

Páll Haukur Björnsson (b. 1981) studied at the Visual Arts Department of the Iceland Academy of the Arts and finished his MFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts in 2013. Páll Haukur has exhibited his works in various galleries and museums in Iceland and abroad. In his art Páll Haukur aims at creating works of art that appear to the viewer as beyond transcendental structures of representation and symbolic hierarchy and that gives the viewer new basis to find meaning. Páll Haukur often uses media that are dependent on time, space and demand the viewer’s engagement.

Þorgerður Þórhallsdóttir (b. 1989) graduated from the Visual Arts Department of the Iceland Academy of the Arts in 2013 and finished her MFA degree from Malmö Art Academy in Sweden 2016. Þorgerður was on the board of the artist-run gallery space Kunstschlager 2013–2015. In recent years Þorgerður has exhibited widely in Iceland and abroad. Memory and perception make up the essence of Þorgerður’s art practice.
BERG  Contemporary
BERG Contemporary
Smiðjustígur 10
Klapparstígur 16
101 Reykjavík
Iceland
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