Eyborg Guðmundsdóttir & Eygló Harðardóttir
Image: Eyborg Guðmundsdóttir, and Eygló Harðardóttir
Skaftfell: Center of Visual Art, East Iceland
October, 2015 – February, 2016
Artists: Eyborg Guðmundsdóttir & Eygló Harðardóttir
Eyborg Guðmundsdóttir (1924-1977) and Eygló Harðardóttir (born 1964) are artists from two different generations. The work of both is abstract, Eyborg predominately made paintings, while Eygló’s work is most often sculptural. Eyborg Guðmundsdóttir’s work uses distinctive geometric forms and vibrant colours to suggest confounding spatial paradoxes. Although she had regular studio visits with Dieter Roth, and when she went to Paris studied with the op-artist Victor Vasarely, her paintings transcend specific influences. They display a continuity with the op-art movement yet also incorporate elements of pop art, in their suggestion of the structures of the modern and physical world. The paintings can appear deceptively simple, yet they often employ ingenious compositional strategies, to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. In relation to this aspect the constructions Eygló Harðardóttir could be thought of as models of the suggested spaces of such abstract paintings. While Eyborg’s paintings appear as objective and hard edged, the sculptures of Eygló are more speculative and tactile in nature. For Eygló Harðardóttir there is an attention to the ways in which colour functions and affects the perception of an object. Her choices of material and construction approaches give the objects a particular immediacy. In a sense the work displays something of the notion of bricolage, that is using materials that are to hand for efficiency of articulation. As such the work can be seen as propositional, as a possible state of existence, rather than an ideal one. In respect to Eyborg’s paintings, these rough forms appear to question the possibility of the former’s objectivism. They seem to suggest that the real world can’t adhere to the idealism of the abstract pictorial plane. This exhibition presents two bodies of work which engage with the nature of of abstract composition and the ways in which its forms accrue meaning and significance. The work of Eyborg seen in relation to Eygló’s gives a comprehension of the ways in which her concerns are still pertinent to artists working today.