NYAB Event - Thordis Adalsteinsdottir Exhibition

Thordis Adalsteinsdottir Exhibition

57 STUX + HALLER Gallery

[Image: Thordis Adalsteinsdottir "Muming and Haribob" (2014) acrylic on canvas, 39 x 39 in.]

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STUX + HALLER presents Thordis Adalsteindottirʼs sixth solo exhibition at our gallery, God Knows How I Adore Life: New Paintings.

This exhibition marks a stylistic shift in Thordis Adalsteinsdottirʼs painting. The artist has unbridled her brush, exploring figures with a layered, vigorous saturation that is definite and new in her work. The characteristic color fields and hand-painted patterns remain, but she now populates them with figures rendered in brushy, dimensional detail that reflects a new treatment of space and figuration.

Recent extended trips abroad to Thailand must have influenced her signature details, those Lilliputian figures and objects we are encouraged to discover in every Thordis painting. A trove of gritty elements awaits our notice; tattoos, cigarettes, bubbles, latex gloves, and a gas mask are but a few.

The sculpture in this exhibition highlights Thordisʼ ability to conjure a playful, yet simultaneously savage, alternate reality. A man with giant hands and vacant eyes looms over a tiny creature clinging to its parachute improvised from polka-dot underpants. Both man and creature are presented in a crude, childish style that recalls Dubuffet, achieving a sort of 21st century surrealist art brut.

Thordis Adalsteinsdottir has exhibited in major museums and galleries world-wide, including The Reykjavik Art Museum, the Knoxville Museum of Art, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, Den Frie Udstilling in Copenhagen, Konstakademien in Stockholm and the Royal College of Art in London. In 2008, Adalsteinsdottir was a finalist for the prestigious Carnegie Art Award for Nordic Painting. The Icelandic-born artist lives and works between New York City and Reykjavik and was a recipient of the 2012 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant.