Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir

Landscape Enclosed
March 19 – April 24 2022

Icelandic-Norwegian artist Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir is renowned in both Iceland and Norway for her multimedia drawings, paintings, installations, and public murals. Her solo exhibition Landscape Enclosed, opening at Gallery Gudmundsdottir in March 2022 showcases her characteristic attention to disciplined line work: each line in her large-scale pieces is meticulously painted freehand. In doing so, Sigmund Gudmundsdottir reflects on the multifaceted impact of line making—or delineating—in visual, metaphorical, and conceptual terms.

Drawing inspiration from the way lines (in many forms) mark out boundaries, such as “tracks in old asphalt, plow tracks in fresh spring soil, digital prints in underground bunkers, storms, rocks, maps, bushes, fences, walls, phobias, coercion, liberation and questions,” Sigmund Gudmundsdottir utilizes the canvas to explore how lines carve out the spaces that shape our lives, be they physical, metaphorical, aesthetic, spatial, or temporal.

We trace the movements we make from birth to death. Lines are formed in the landscape as a plow plows the ground.
— Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir

In visual terms, Sigmond Gudmundsdottir’s intricate line work dominates the canvas, while at the same time giving rise to palpable forms that dynamically materialize and disappear as they morph into each other.

 The images are established through a tight, almost rigid alignment that retains an underlying light and energy in the subject, where I am aiming for an almost optical effect of air layers or vibrating movements that spread beyond a boundless space.
— Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir

This tension between ever-shifting image fragments and the static lines that shape them, explores dynamic (and often productive) tensions between control and chaos. For Sigmund Gudmundsdottir, these two elements are in constant play with each other—on the canvas, in physical landscapes, and in life—betraying a strong aesthetic kineticism that underscores the shifting nature of existence and the spaces we carve out within it.

I work with the interplay between the flow of the paint and the dominance of the line. The line can be seen as a shading or a blurring of the pure colors behind, and the image can be energetic, chaotic and conflict-filled, but at the same time soothing as when you sit indoors and look at a storm.
— Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir

In exploring the subtle dynamism between lines and shapes, another visual element that rises to the fore in Sigmund Gudmundsdottir’s work is the inescapable significance of texture. Sigmund Gudmundsdottir notes:

We unfold in nature by carving out some form of texture. Compressed, this becomes a physical form outside our own body. An energetic hairball, a fluid or stiffened movement that either closes or opens up to light.
— Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir 

This attention to texture makes a subtle nod to Sigmund Gudmundsdottir’s earlier mural work—notably, to the textured wall surfaces that typically comprise a mural’s “underpainting.” Here, representations of what might otherwise be seen as “background” surface become a central component of what is on view for aesthetic attention. This interplay between “foreground” and “background” departs from historical trends that underplay surfaces, textures, and other “background” aspects of a painting, giving her work a compelling—and utterly contemporary—conceptual thrust.

Continuing this thread, Sigmond Gudmundsdottir’s line work also foregrounds elements of artistic process that typically fall into the “background,” notably, the painstaking nature of artistic labor. Her process is spontaneous, with forms materializing organically as she paints the lines. The tension between the apparent simplicity of lines and surfaces and the dynamic complexity of the forms generated highlights the act of mark making. The paintings allude to the choices that artists make as they lay marks on a surface, and the inherent tensions that arise from “delineating” within the artistic process itself:

“It’s the most dangerous place to be. Not to go too far. Not too little. It’s like chess, don’t make a stupid step at the last minute.”
— Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir

The dynamism of Sigmond Gudmunsdottir’s paintings—evident in shapes and forms that appear and disappear as soon as the eye discerns them—speaks to another aspect of the bittersweet pains of artistic labor, namely the feeling that a work never feels truly finished until the artist has pushed a step too far. Sigmond Gudmundsdottir remarks:

“I have to be done, but I leave some small details until the bitter end, the moment when everything goes to hell and beautiful moments in the painting end up hidden in a veil of self-doubt. Then I work even more to hide my bad sides … when I feel dead, I wake up. I can’t help it, and I keep going. And no one ever sees it, that the paintings were better four days ago.”
— Anna Marie Sigmond Gudmundsdottir

The linear intricacy of Sigmond Gudmundsdottir’s work thus draws attention to a commonly overlooked aspect of the artistic endeavor, namely, the artist’s labor, which Sigmond Gudmundsdottir materializes as content that is central to the viewer’s aesthetic experience: the paintings, with refreshing honesty, unabashedly wear their labor on their sleeve.  In contemplating the kinetic interplay of simplicity and complexity, the viewer is similarly invited to discern ever-shifting forms, until they too, cannot look any more, and must “draw a line” around their contemplation, before stopping and looking at the paintings anew.

Text Dr. Erum Naqvi