Guðný Guðmundsdóttir
Cassiopeia
28. April - 5. June 2023
Compositions, palette, arrows, and text create an architectural first impression, while archaic visual elements reminisce watercolour sketches by those early 20th century spiritists probing communication between the spiritual and material worlds. In Maison de Poseidon – someplace between a drawing, flow chart and score – the lines sometimes resemble structures (screen walls?), and other times point out movement or direction, a spiral, a curve. Three blue rectangles with single round corners framing the composition re-occur in Maison de Cassiopeia, but this home seems to have different gravitational pull (she lives in a diamond). Other works, like the German-titled Der Sphinx and Der ethiopische Garten, hint radical modernist architects’ megalomanic plans – with linear cities based on an abstraction of the shape of the human body with head, spine, arms, and legs. Or should these constellations, rather than maps, be seen as instructions? As a musical arrangement, or a configuration for dance?
Ferdinand Leger wrote somewhere that he sets “curves against straight lines, patches of colour against plastic forms, pure colours against subtly nuanced shades of grey”. However, the distinctive inscriptions and titles in German, French and English suggest less formal levels of interpretation, and Guðný Guðmundsdóttir sends me down the rabbit hole of Greek mythology as I try to comprehend the relationships between the named figures in the exhibition: Cassiopeia, the Nereid, queen of Ethiopia and mother of Andromeda who lives in the Northern sky as punishment for her vanity (here, also in the form of a cat). Poseidon, who wanted to send a tsunami to reprimand Cassiopeia for declaring her beauty. And who, when she turned out to be resourceful enough to defended herself, sent a sea monster to destroy her. Fate has always been the realm of the gods, though even the gods are subject to it. The solution was to sacrifice her daughter, Andromeda. But when the monster was about to devour Andromeda, Persus arrived on Pegasus, the winged horse (in other versions wearing Hermes winged sandals) and slayed the monster.
In Guðmundsdóttir’s watercolours, the blue-to-green palette of the Mediterranean Sea is combined with soft hues of peach, intertwined with greys, pencilled lines, and the odd oil pastel like in Tragédienne de l’ouest. Unexpectedly, the image of a fighter jet materializes in what first appeared to be a celestial diagram or an eye (Manœuvre divine – mur du son).
Juxtaposed against the image of a winged horse (Barrier of sound) the myths are brought into contemporaneity. In some versions, Pegasus was born from the blood of Medusa when Perseus beheaded her. The horse sprang fully formed from the blood of the Gorgon as it spilled onto the ground. I remember reading somewhere that when Perseus set out to slay the monster sent by Poseidon, he held up the head of Medusa, turning the sea monster into stone and thus saving Andromeda from one monster with the head of another. The chain of destiny can perhaps only be grasped one link at a time. In the exhibition there is a small clay sculpture of a seated woman. I imagine that it must be Themis, the personification of justice, goddess of wisdom and good counsel, and interpreter of the gods' will. In the realm of human fate, questions become more important than answers.
Text ; Jonatan Habib Engqvist
Guðný Guðmundsdóttir
Cold Man’s Trophies | Pure Maid’s Garlands
31. July 2020 - 5. September 2020
INSTALLATION VIEW | WORKS | PDF
In fluid dynamics, a vortex is a region in liquid in which the flow revolves around an axis line; it may be straight or curved. The concept of circulation exceeds our sensation of time as if stuck, placed, compartmentalised in vertical vacuum without linear time. Our perception of an endless cycle becomes horizontal, viewing the same moment from infinite perspectives. With every perspective experienced – getting closer to the core. Revolving on the fluidity of existence, mapping it, re-mapping it, breaking it down to its smallest common denominator, picking up the pieces, and putting them back together. The same pieces but a different perspective - endless cycles around the same axis line. Is there time?
Ophelia floats in the water, she is slowly beginning to sink. Her heavy robes pull her into the vortex of capsuled time surrounded by flowering greens and garlands around her neck. Why did she die? At this point, she is already estranged from reality, driven to insanity by impossible situations. Or is it that the world that she lives in has become insane, and her sanity a surreal oasis exploited by her fellow men?
The shifting of perspectives is a cornerstone in Guðný Guðmundsdóttir´s body of work. She dismantles her subjects, leisurely peeling the layers off, researching and understanding bit by bit and then assembling the pieces together again, creating in utter precision new objects, landscapes, maps, details. The image of Ophelia comes to her, counter clockwise, like from another end of a vortex where she had been capsuled. The flow of the two revolves around the same axis for a while before Ophelia gets pulled in again. During their cycle together Guðný is given the opportunity of a reenactment of Ophelia's death. She maps it, breaks it down to its smallest particle as well as scaling it up to its largest, finding the contradicting discrepancy, attracting opposites, juxtaposing the powers of man/maschine and nature.
Cold Man’s Trophies | Pure Maid’s Garlands is a game of poetic language, a homage to reflection of perspectives and to the manifestation of the harsh powers of nature. The image of Ophelia (John Everet Millais) with her femininity, strength and vulnerability are in stark contradiction to the visual and literary memory of the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Casper David Friedrich), the übermensch, and romanticism in general. These opposites, feminine/masculine, are moving in opposite directions around the same axis line, encapsulated in time, in endless cycles.