The Living Art Museum is endowed with a large selection of material from the studio of artist Ólafur Lárusson (1951 – 2014). Family of the late Ólafur Lárusson, have gifted the Living Art Museum a large portion of material, spanning two decades from around 1970 – 1990, gathered from Ólafur´s art studio. Amongst this donation is part of the artist´s personal library, his film collection, negatives, slides, photographs, sketches, VHS recordings performance documentation, exhibition catalogues and invitations, artistic research and experimentation, as well as proposals for works in the form of drawings, snapshots and conceptualizations that had never been fully realized.

The Living Art Museum will move their exhibition space to the newly renovated Marshall House in Grandi, alongside Kling and Bang Gallery and Ólafur Elíasson. The new space in the harbour will open with a retrospective exhibition echoing Ólafur´s practice and contribution as one from the young and radical generation of contemporary artists who surfaced during the seventies. It will include documentation of his performance work and other substantial material that had not been shared with the public eye during his lifetime and pull together works from The National Gallery of Iceland and Reykjavík Art Museum, along with those in private collection from friends, family, and collectors.

A photograph from Ólafur´s 1978 Rainbow performance in SÚM Gallery.

Curators Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir, Director of the Living Art Museum and Collection Manager Becky Forsythe have titled the exhibition Rolling Line, the namesake to a photographic work Ólafur completed in 1975. The artist himself is seen somersaulting through nature within Rolling Line, and the work references the possibility of a continuous line always ending in a circle. This reflection is well related to the core of the exhibition, which aims to shed new light on the process and period of the artist, from 1971 when he started as a student in The Icelandic College of Art and Craft, until the early eighties when Ólafur began to turn away from one of his main mediums, the photograph.

Ólafur Lárusson was born in 1951 and raised in Austur-Meðalholtum, South Iceland and in Hlíðar – 105 Reykjavík. He studied at the Icelandic College of Art and Craft, now Iceland Academy of the Arts, from 1971-74 and subsequently in Haarlem, Holland, where he graduated from Atalier ´63 in 1976. Ólafur was an extremely prolific and productive artist during the seventies and played a key role in shaping the priorities of the icelandic art scene at that time. He was amongst the last artists to be accepted into the SÚM Gallery movement, a founding member of the Living Art Museum, and the first indications of the museum were stored in his studio on Mjölnisholt prior to when the board of Nýló received the facilities at Vatnsstígur 3b in 1980.

Rolling Line, 1975

“The gift from Ólafur´s studio, marks a turning point for Nýló and is also an important addition to art history. The archive is the first of its kind to be accepted by the museum, where light is cast upon the life and practice of the artist in such a way. With the family´s donation, video documentation from Ólafur´s Rainbow performance – which was performed in SÚM Gallery in 1978 and had been lost for many years, has now surfaced. The recording shows the artist breaking hanging glass plates that have been painted the colours of the rainbow, with his head – the broken glass swinging back and forth alongside it.

This contribution also strengthens Nýló´s research into collecting, preserving and archiving performance art, and underlines the immeasurable value of the insight provided through otherwise unseen material gathered over time in the artist´s studio; conceptual-work, the process and evolution of artworks, and specific focuses, streams and remains of certain periods.”

Ólafur passed away on December 4th, 2014. On 10th September he would have celebrated his 65th birthday and the museum would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge his contribution to shaping the scene of Icelandic art.

On behalf of the Living Art Museum,
Þorgerður Ólafsdóttir and Becky Forsythe

 By Becky Forsythe

Space / drawing, which brings together numerous works on paper and in sculpture by Þóra Sigurðardóttir, offers a record of the information that we use to read or map space. Reconsidering the spaces that surround us and our investments in these places as lines, impressions, framed memory or conceptual horizons becomes a way of creating an alternative viewpoint, such as a drawing or diagram. When the works in this exhibition are taken into closer consideration, Þóra´s art practice is revealed as an extension of her life experiences: things she has stumbled on and become fascinated with, observations that transform, and an attention paid towards growth, repetition, exchange and tangibility as it appears to her in the surroundings. She takes on the role of the artist as a mobile perceiver by offering different angles of the fields we occupy as consideration for structures found in everyday life and society – structures and perceptions which are in the end fluid, moving and able to shift.

Most of the work presented here is recent, aside from a few elements, including an older recording that arrives from time spent in Denmark and is revisited in Arinstofa. The video shows a tree, covered completely by white webbing and is not far off or unlike Þóra´s approach to drawing. The natural lines drawn through the tree by the web are organic and visceral, with numerous layers to work through and visual language to decipher. This work, like the entire exhibition, is a look into the qualities of material in transformation, the process of outlining negative and positive spaces, and environmental sequences that feed Þóra´s ongoing explorations in navigating and recording. One viewpoint of a tree in a natural urban habitat becomes endless material for investment when it is transformed into a sketch of something else. Through the attention paid to the found subject, the video reminisces over a certain experience in a place during a particular moment, which becomes a thread running through the exhibition. The perspective given in Gryfja also considers this point in a series of movements through built environments..1954, Akureyri) art practice applies drawing, and often other mediums, as a way to expand patterned repetition, inversion and transformation through the nature of material, process and environment. Working in two- and three-dimensional forms she places emphasis on navigating layered surfaces and structures.

In Ásmundarsalur you will find large works on paper, with titles referring to their medium, hung alongside a collection of digitally-printed impressions collected from cut trees. Both of these series examine line as a build-up of different layers, which push how the surface is read, or multiple surfaces in this case, as space is added and subtracted in positives and negatives. Space is seen as a series of layers – from the ground up – a sequence of environments that absorb multiple surfaces and reference not only time, but distance, measurement and shifts within those structures. Drawn and constructed grids appear throughout and help to breakdown the levels in a mathematical way, reflecting an obvious human-made system of recording. Organic lines then trace different and contrasting pathways that cut the systematic surfaces and their structure most distinctly in the large drawings and the sculptures. In this dichotomy the hand of the artist, or the human, draws pathways across our measured and perhaps material world. As mirrored also within the tree-ring records, nature and human experience remain a sacred part of the investigations Þóra undertakes. These act as a reminder of the innate worlds that exist beyond those readily visible to us. In the case of the trees, spent or exhausted natural remains and processed leftovers are investigated in such a way that they see new light and are expanded in a context where they are free from their usual boundaries. The surfaces contribute to adapting physical (and intangible) structures as a new way of seeing particular environments, like those things we find in the artificial world.

Þóra´s works reveal another side to the patterned one that surrounds us, sometimes from domestic interiors, as navigations through those interiors, recordings, or built settings. In particular, this reference point, the view offered to us through the artist, can function as a meeting place for the imagination and its physical counterparts. Reading surfaces becomes more of a way of understanding our own position in the spaces we occupy and the relationship between the two. The key to entering into Þóra´s work is to keep one foot on each side of the division, or better yet, allow for both sides to permeate the other.

As you wander through the exhibition, amongst conceptual horizon lines, I encourage you to consider the space your body occupies, what surrounds you and the paths you create as you move and construct trails. Allow the works to be reference points or reminders that calibrate the awareness of your movements and gestures, both as negatives and positives. It is my hope that a reflection of other environments will lead you to recollect or connect to the way Þóra´s work builds new representations. Our environments can be examined as planes layered one on top of the other and map-like as they consider different, but specific moments. Whether these moments can be translated into other forms of space-making is left up to the viewer. And, the viewer is encouraged to investigate this matter further. By taking a longer look into these things, we might recognize an attachment to our own experience as it contributes to the way we read the world around us.

Þóra Sigurðardóttir´s (b.1954, Akureyri) art practice applies drawing, and often other mediums, as a way to expand patterned repetition, inversion and transformation through the nature of material, process and environment. Working in two- and three-dimensional forms she places emphasis on navigating layered surfaces and structures.

After completing studies at the Icelandic College of Art and Craft (1979-81) Þóra pursued graduate studies at Det Jyske Kunstakademi in Denmark (1987-91). She then received an MA in Cultural Studies and Cultural Management from the University of Iceland (2012) and has studied Philosophy and Art History at the Open University.

Þóra´s work has been exhibited locally and internationally since 1991 and can be found in private and public collections in Iceland and abroad including the Reykjavík Art Museum, The National Gallery of Iceland, and the Living Art Museum. Other projects have included managing and curating Dalir og hólar, a mobile exhibition project in Breiðafjörður and developing the guesthouse Nýp in West Iceland.

For more information visit: www.thorasig.is

Becky Forsythe received her BFA from York University with a concentration in Visual Arts (2007), her MA from the University of Manitoba with a research specialization in cultural history and contemporary art (2011) and a Graduate Certificate in Museum and Gallery Studies from Georgian College (2014). Becky is a writer, curator and Collection Manager at the Living Art Museum (Nýló) in Reykjavík, where she currently lives and works.

Photographs from exhibition: Courtesy of Vigfús Birgisson.