ART, APPARITIONS, LAND AND LIVES

COULORS AND LANDSCAPES

Colours are the foundations of Pálína‘s Guðmundsdóttir art. While studying art she also did a degree in linguistics and her work is dedicated to the expression of colours. The colours light up the paintings and give them with a demanding presence, while also offering up a search for lines and forms. This play with lines and forms can appear both in faces and the irregular borderlines of the layered landscape of colours.

Orange and yellow colours are often present, together with mauve, blue and turquois. Flashes of red, green and purple appear also. The colours are strong and deep and the artist lines up diverse ranges of colours that flow across the canvas, demarcating forms and figures in a distinctive texture.

While studying in Holland, Pálína started working with abstract paintings, focusing on colour and texture. Although she started doing more figurative work, painting faces, the emphasis on colours continued. In Holland she worked with a chemist, doing research into materials, such as lacquer. As expected the years in the academy led the artist into wrestling with form and matter, and seeking her own ways of seeing and expressing. She experimented, among other things, with paintings that would lean against the wall, rather than being mounted on it. 

In 2013 Pálína was the town artist of Akureyri. She exhibited twenty year old abstract paintings under the title “Space”, in an architect studio, previously the old potato-storages in the town’s old centre. The paintings had never been on display before, and the location itself was significant as they were all about space in a broad context; indistinct empty room or apertures could be discerned in the planes. Space has various meanings in language: finding your own space (such as ‘a room of your own’), personal space,  public space, private space, breathing space, empty space and so on. These concepts indicate the need to define space within and around the individual. Objects are catalogued and they are arranged into compartments or subjective spaces. A painting is always based on creating a space in a very personal way with colours and structure. Each colour has its own space, the cold ones withdraw into the background while the warm ones are more salient and stand out.

Earth and water

Pálína’s abstract paintings sometimes intimate landscapes, horizons, tumultuous skies and waters. Eventually the works moved closer to the landscape, although her landscapes always span the abstract and the figurative. Paintings of mountains are based on mirroring effects where the colour is dominant, traced with lines and planes.

The landscapes recall the desolate highlands surrounding the farm where Pálína has her roots. She grew up in Bárðardalur, the longest valley in Iceland, reaching the furthest into the wastelands. Her grandparents farm is closest to the highlands, on that side of the Skjálfandafljót-river, running through the valley. Hiking, vast views and stories of travelling the uninhabited land inspired an urge to explore the highlands in painting. 

The diverse waters of Skjálfandafljót and its exquisite waterfalls also inspired Pálína, and the feel of water is easily seen in her works, such as in the seething whirlpools of colour in many of the abstracts. In Akureyri the water is also close by, and when the artist moved to Gothenburg in Sweden she continued to be surrounded by water, with the harbour and the nearby archipelago. The rhythm of water, waves and channels are easily seen in Pálína’s work, both in the abstracts and the paintings of faces. In life as in water there are lulls and waves, calm surfaces and dangerous undercurrents and the same goes for the faces of the people she paints. Reflecting on the water is the sky, in all its variants, drawing shadows and new colours into land and sea.

In these flowing landscapes, particularly those in watercolours, a feeling for nature is clear, such as in parks and botanical gardens. Pálína lived abroad for eighteen years and sought out such havens. Another inspiration is Akureyri’s old and beautiful botanical garden and the artist is keen on growth and flora, creating ever moving landscapes.

Country and city

Moving from the isolation in Bárðardalur to Akureyri town was quite a change for a young child, and an even bigger one met the young woman when she started her studies in Gothenburg. The city and the crowds offered powerful experiences and ever since the artist has drawn inspiration from urban life, even more than from nature and wastelands. All of this comes together in the paintings of faces. The faces often line up in close groups, creating a feeling for the myriad of faces characteristic of life in a big city. Urban landscapes are also wastelands in their own way and cities are rife with diverse lines, such as streets and trains, trams and walkways, underground and above ground.

This expression of city and wastelands appear strongly in paintings that Pálína did in Berlin, and recall her older work. In Berlin she had a studio that provided her with enough space to work on a large scale. Those paintings can be viewed as an city(land)scapes, seen from afar, where all details are fuzzy and only the main outlines are visible. These works were exhibited under the title “Journey” in 2014. The largest piece was a 5mx160cm acryl-painting. It is abstract in the way that the colours are predominant, layered with flowing lines and forms. The exhibition also included watercolours showing hazy landscapes and a number of small oil paintings with faces. A year later Pálína exhibited another large painting from Berlin in the congregational home of the Akureyri church, together with several abstracts from 1989.

The Berlin paintings were also exhibited in the abandoned factory at Hjalteyri, 2016, in a group exhibition curated by Pálína, titled “Argumentative”. The title refers to pressing questions based on a work by the German artist Karla Sachse, from 2005, where she addressed several issues relating to the terrors during, and following upon, World War II in Germany. Her exhibition was located in a historical house originally built as a hospital but later occupied by Stasi, the East-German secret service after the war. Former members of Stasi did all they could to have the works removed, but Sachse managed to overrule them and the works have remained in the house. Thus Sachse won her argument with Stasi. This struggle inspired Pálína to mount a first all women exhibition in the old factory. She wanted to point out that the role of art can be a number of things, decoration and beauty, but also an empowering and awakening act for artist and audience, where critical questions are asked. Such art is often unpopular by the powers that be and Pálína wished to emphasise the importance of how artists should be allowed to be true to themselves and their art, despite objections. Much like symbols, art has the ability to appeal directly to the audiences’ intelligence and feelings, bypassing conscious thought. Art does not have to be directly political, politics can just as well be found in the simple act of creating art, outside of what is considered acceptable or ‘in’.

Pálína’s work with the flow of lines, travelines and faces in the Berlin paintings offers an insight into her emphasis on surroundings, context and social situation. Colours and forms of nature are always nearby and she expresses the feeling drawn from that background and brings it into the urban life where multitudes and loneliness go hand in hand. Thus the works are not only concerned with city(land)scapes and nature, but are also an investigation into the flora of human life and culture, together with the individual’s stand and feelings about her surroundings – as well as the status of the human being in society and nature. This position involves a critique of the flaws of society, and Pálína’s work skilfully weaves personal aspects with social experiences.