HELENA MARGRET JONSDOTTIR
"My work expresses painting in the time of wirelessness and digital imagery.
The subjects are mundane and paired together based on their visual and subjective connections. They do not belong to an environment or cast shadows as they are placed on flat, dimensionless backgrounds. They are both personal and public.
By pairing them together they form new connections between them, new threads."
Helena Margrét Jónsdóttir is a visual artist based in Reykjavík. She studied fine art at The Reykjavík School of Visual Arts, The Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag and graduated from The Iceland University of the Arts in 2019. Her work expresses the mundane, the wireless and the digital.
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As a way of self-reflection and even amusement, Jónsdóttir is constructing surreal or even abstract visuals in which realistic elements suggest its existence in our everyday reality. Starting with the Photoshop collages, she then paints those in oil, bringing them to life as a whole, merging the factualness of the screen with the credibility of traditional oil painting. Regularly referencing herself with the depiction of objects from her imminent surroundings, from shoes, over candies, drinks, and other common items, she’s making fun of her own moments of clumsiness, misery, and different forms of awkwardness.
Clashing almost photorealistic renditions of certain elements against completely distorted and dissolved silhouettes, she confronts our significance against the influence of what surrounds or defines us. This unusual high-tech melancholy with a sense of undesignated notalgia is to some extent emphasized by the experience of life on a lone island in the midst of the North Atlantic. Non apologetically self-critical, the Reykjavik-based artist repeatedly works with the same figure (self)portrayed in the void space, again evoking the sense of life on a remote island. Simply trying to relax but inexplicably and continuously failing, her protagonist is at this point turning into Liquida, a running substance without a constant form or shape.
