Galleri Lars Bohman is proud to present Icelandic artist, Georg Gudni’s fifth exhibition at the gallery. He will show new paintings and watercolours.
He was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Iceland. The Director, Dr. Ólafur Kvaran, describes Gudni’s art thus:
‘Georg Gudni is in many respects unique among the artists of the New Painting, who emerged in the 1980s. Instead of dealing with man and his existence, his subject matter from the very beginning was nature – landscapes with no people. It can be asserted that Gudni’s historical role in the 1980s was to revive landscape paintings as a meaningful subject.
Landscape painting had its heyday in Icelandic art during the first half of the twentieth century, and played an important part in moulding the nation’s cultural identity. But Gudni’s art did not aim to resurrect the old landscape painting tradition. The subject as such had another meaning in the 1980s, stripped of the range of allusions that it had at the beginning of the century. Innovation in Gudni’s art is not only the treatment of landscape painting in a new social context but also, and not least in his novel interpretation, in both form and concept. Gudni fluctuates between legible landscapes with open and defined space and paintings where the subject matter takes an abstract form, with respect for the strict values of geometric planes. This objective attitude and simplification of form does not, however, mean that the art is entirely devoid of allusions to nature. Delight in nature is always there, even as hidden signs. At the same time the works include a web of references, both in form and content, to various artistic viewpoints. This manifests itself in the hierarchy of the forms, the unbridled flow of light, parallel structure, open pictorial space and colourful expression. All of this educes a sense of contemplation, cryptic magic or the exoticism of nature. The artistic reality of his works is thus at once close and familiar, but at the same time foreign, as our perception and ideas about nature are sharpened when it is raised to another plane of existence.’
Georg Gudni was born in Reykjavik in 1961 where he lives and works. He attended the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in Reykjavik (1980-1985) and the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (1985-87).
He is represented at, among others, the National Gallery of Iceland, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Malmö Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo and the Nordic Watercolour Museum, Sweden.
He was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Iceland. The Director, Dr. Ólafur Kvaran, describes Gudni’s art thus:
‘Georg Gudni is in many respects unique among the artists of the New Painting, who emerged in the 1980s. Instead of dealing with man and his existence, his subject matter from the very beginning was nature – landscapes with no people. It can be asserted that Gudni’s historical role in the 1980s was to revive landscape paintings as a meaningful subject.
Landscape painting had its heyday in Icelandic art during the first half of the twentieth century, and played an important part in moulding the nation’s cultural identity. But Gudni’s art did not aim to resurrect the old landscape painting tradition. The subject as such had another meaning in the 1980s, stripped of the range of allusions that it had at the beginning of the century. Innovation in Gudni’s art is not only the treatment of landscape painting in a new social context but also, and not least in his novel interpretation, in both form and concept. Gudni fluctuates between legible landscapes with open and defined space and paintings where the subject matter takes an abstract form, with respect for the strict values of geometric planes. This objective attitude and simplification of form does not, however, mean that the art is entirely devoid of allusions to nature. Delight in nature is always there, even as hidden signs. At the same time the works include a web of references, both in form and content, to various artistic viewpoints. This manifests itself in the hierarchy of the forms, the unbridled flow of light, parallel structure, open pictorial space and colourful expression. All of this educes a sense of contemplation, cryptic magic or the exoticism of nature. The artistic reality of his works is thus at once close and familiar, but at the same time foreign, as our perception and ideas about nature are sharpened when it is raised to another plane of existence.’
Georg Gudni was born in Reykjavik in 1961 where he lives and works. He attended the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts in Reykjavik (1980-1985) and the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (1985-87).
He is represented at, among others, the National Gallery of Iceland, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, Malmö Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo and the Nordic Watercolour Museum, Sweden.