Artist in Focus: Erla S. Haraldsdóttir

There is a noticeable curatorial and institutional attention today toward architecture, light, and movement as organizing frameworks for exhibitions and spatial experience. To what extent do you see contemporary painting engaging with this shift, if at all?

EH: Not really these days… but I do think it has some of its roots in relational aesthetics that appeared in the 90s, and I remember it in contemporary photography back then, in the 90s and early 2000s, with photographers like Rut Blees Luxemburg, best known for her night photographs of sidewalks and cities. I'm also thinking of artists like James Turrell, who is all about turning the white cube into a site-specific experiment with light installation. I really haven't seen it in painting, I'm trying to remember. Of course, you have Marcel Duchamp, who exhibited the "empty gallery" space 100 years ago. I think architecture as a motif is more common in video games and in science fiction films, especially now with AI. I honestly haven't seen it in painting…not as I've seen it represented in contemporary photography.

Your recent paintings operate in a distinctly site-responsive way, treating the exhibition space itself as both subject and condition. In your latest solo museum exhibition in Johannesburg, you installed paintings that depict the architecture of the gallery in which they are shown. What motivated this site-specific approach?

EH: I did these kinds of experiments with the space where I was exhibiting back in 1998 and 1999, right after graduation from the art academy. I was thinking about how painting was the apparent identity of fine art, and how the gallery and the art institution were expected to deliver that idea. Conventions which I wanted to rebel against, very much in that spirit of my time as a young artist. In a photographic series called "Beautiful landscape" of Icelandic nature, I also included a subtly superimposed image of the space itself, which was exhibited at Ynglingagatan 1 in Stockholm[i] and presented at the same size as the landscape photographs. I then took this idea to the extreme with the Reykjavik series: "Here, there and everywhere" (with Bo Melin) from 2001, where we transformed Reykjavik into a multi-cultural city through photographic manipulation (something it wasn't at that time), and also at Momentum in Moss, Norway, back in 2004, where we again turned the small town of Moss into a sort of a dystopia. We exhibited these photographs as site-specific interventions on billboards around the city.

When I was looking at the space called the New Wing at the Origins Centre in Johannesburg, a place with very modern architecture, the opposite of a white cube, that space is in concrete with asymmetric, sharp corners, and exceptional light circumstances, the space itself struck me. The idea came to me to make a series of paintings of the space itself. I was in awe of the space and the light, how it struck the concrete walls and created different colors depending on the light outside and the time of day. I asked myself, what else can capture this, even just a little bit? I wanted to try it out, and I did.

In these recent series, light emerges as a central protagonist, and with it color. Walls seem to bend, corridors dissolve, and windows begin to glow. Rather than recalling architectural drawing or the utopian language of modernism, the paintings feel intuitive and bodily in their address. What role do light and color play in your practice, and what do they come to signify for you? 

EH:  I’m intrigued by colour—by the way combinations form, dissolve, and reform under changing conditions. I find myself searching for it constantly, almost the way one listens for a motif returning in music. Every material carries its own optical behaviour: pigment, fibre, skin, stone, metal—each reflects, absorbs, and scatters light differently, producing colour as an event rather than a thing.

In certain moments I experience colour with an almost synaesthetic intensity—as if it could be tasted. A particular hue can trigger a wave of pleasure through my body, not as decoration, but as a physical signal: an urge to mix, to test, to translate sensation into form. Light is the active agent here. Because light differs from place to place on Earth—its angle, temperature, humidity, particulate density—the same surface can produce entirely different chromatic truths.

What fascinates me most is subtle colour: tones that only reveal themselves under specific conditions. A thread of colour can be caught in a brief alignment of light and material—present for a moment, then gone. It feels like magic, yet it is precise: a small shift in incidence, texture, or atmosphere, and the spectrum reorganizes.

There is no pure white, and no pure black—only gradations of luminance, endlessly recombined. In this sense, colour is never fixed. It is relational and unstable, continuously negotiated between light, surface, and perception. Colour shifts, not because it is unreliable, but because it is alive to circumstance.

In the early 2000s, painters like Franz Ackermann, with his mental maps, and Peter Doig, with his lyrical expressionism, were using architecture to think about how we pass through and inhabit the world. Do you see your current project as aligned with their works, or do you have another set of reference points that inform your painting now?

EH: I feel strongly related to the works of Peter Doig; I'm not as familiar with Franz Ackermann, but I need to check him out. I think my reference points could be Guy Debord and psychogeography. Also, I'm thinking of German expressionistic movies from the 20s, like Fritz Lang's Metropolis or F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, and the film noir Genre.

Also, I feel an affinity for Georges Perec and the OULIPO, a group of poets, writers, and mathematicians who developed rules and restrictions for writing fiction in reaction to the surrealists and the symbolists. Those people, of course, were responding to the DADA movement. I'm currently thinking about how to use the spaces where I exhibit, along with rules and restrictions, to frame my art practice. I've been doing that throughout my whole career as an artist, but now it's more evident than ever.

Part of the current architectural turn in your work feels like a response to a life increasingly lived through screens. I think that, generally speaking, painting offers spatial depth, atmosphere, and corporeal orientation, things that are best experienced live. I feel that, with so much of our day-to-day lives flattened into engaging with images through screen interfaces, an encounter with art in real life is a balm. The architecture you paint in these site-responsive paintings offers viewers a familiar structure by depicting the rooms in which they are displayed; however, light, movement, and your painting style destabilize it. The result is a genre of uncanny or liminal space that feels remembered rather than measured—half real, half imagined, especially when viewing the works in the gallery. What are your thoughts on this?

EH: I got the idea of creating paintings mirroring/reflecting the space it's shown in after a hike in the Cederberg mountains in the Western cape of South Africa, I went there with my partner, and we were off grid for a week', with no internet, just hiking and seeing rock art, in its natural environment, made over 10000 years ago. It was as if time had frozen, and you could feel the presence of the early San people making these paintings. The rock's surface inside the caves and the lighting conditions made it so wonderfully real: this was actually happening there, time had frozen, and it was like time-traveling through a wormhole. I mean, talk about site-specific art. Here, the San people were depicting how to hunt, for instance. There are different theories about that. But this experience really made me feel in the here and now. I wanted to create that feeling of being here and now.

There is a strong emotional dimension to your work. Light in these paintings rarely behaves neutrally; it leaks, pulses, flickers, or fades. The range of color you use to depict the light suggests time passing, moods shifting, or something about to happen. I find that there is an element of implied movement which draws the viewer in, inviting them to enter the space rather than observe it from a distance. Is this what you hope to elicit in your work?

EH: What is so fascinating about painting is that no one brush stroke is the same; it's nearly impossible to make the same brush stroke. So a painting reflects layers and layers of individual colour combinations and brush strokes, it becomes like a body that breathes. Sometimes the body is tired, not feeling well, sometimes euphoric, sometimes just at peace, and it all embodies the same worth; there is no hierarchy in the brushstrokes. The process of making is what makes painting so fascinating. It's a process, and you think and feel through painting. It's something very earthy and also idealistic at the same time. One has an idea about something, and when painting the concept, you must bow down to all the earthy, realistic, materialistic factors of it, for instance, time and gravity. So it binds the soul to the Earth and creates its own body, layer by layer, with paint. Also, painting takes a long time and forces you into a meditative, contemplative mode. It's very spiritual and down-to-earth at the same time.

In a moment marked by uncertainty, depicting interior architecture in painting becomes less about control and more about permeability. These works don't present perfect buildings; they show moments of transition and fragmentary views of spaces. Perhaps that's why they resonate now: they reflect how many of us experience the present—not as a stable structure, but as a series of dynamic passages shaped by light, motion, and change.

EH:

Yes, it is undoubtedly fascinating; it's an attempt to capture something, and it's never-perfect… that is why painting is so profoundly human.