The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present its fifth exhibition of works by the much-admired Icelandic painter Louisa Matthíasdóttir (1917-2000) from May 5 through June 17, 2016. The artist is best known for her luminous landscapes of Iceland populated with people, sheep and horses. The paintings are made up of simplified geometric shapes and highly saturated colors. The exhibition will comprise a selection of large and medium-sized paintings from the 1980s through the 1990s.
Louisa studied in Copenhagen and Paris. Her early paintings, dating from the late 1930s, established her as a leading figure in the Icelandic avant-garde community. In 1942 she moved to New York, where she attended Hans Hofmann’s school. Along with a group of fellow former Hofmann students, including Robert de Niro, Sr., Larry Rivers, Nell Blaine and Jane Freilicher, she helped to foster a new sense of relevance for representational painting and a synthesis between the visual world and abstraction.
Louisa Matthíasdóttir’s work has been exhibited and collected widely throughout the United States and in Iceland. Her paintings are included in many private and public collections, including the Tate Gallery, London, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A retrospective was presented at the Scandinavia House in New York in 2004, which then traveled to Iceland and Europe. The National Gallery of Iceland will present a Centenary exhibition of the artist’s work in the fall of 2017.
In addition to Matthíasdóttir’s works, The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is presenting Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson’s Woven Works. Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson creates woven color field-like paintings. Jónsson weaves hand-dyed, hand-loomed silk textiles, both small and very large in scale. In her first exhibition with the gallery, the show will include a group of small new works as well as one large piece. Her source material comes from the photographs she takes twice a year when she returns to her native Iceland. Cropping and enlarging details of these photographs of mountainous silhouettes and glacial crevasses, she transfers these extracted images and then weaves them into her paintings. She stains the fibers of her warp (the vertical threads), then, once it is dry, weaves in the weft (the transverse threads). This interlacing must be carefully planned, yet the compositions seem impromptu in their finished appearance.
Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson was born in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1963. She studied architecture at Kent State University and then studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She completed a BFA at Kent State in 1991 and received an MFA in 1995. She had solo exhibitions at the TANG Museum, Reykjavik Art Museum, MOCA Cleveland, Pocket Utopia, NY, and Turpentine Gallery, Reykjavík. Her work is in the collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Reykjavík Museum of Art.
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 724 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019. Click here to read more about the Gallery’s upcoming exhibitions.
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