The mountains that appear in Gudrún's paintings are stylised abstractions, not representations. Rather than take the landscape as her starting point she uses it to balance and expand the purely formal needs of the painting. What emerges is really a tension between the two dimensional arrangement of forms in the paintings and the sense of space that is the result of subtle evocations of a landscape.

Pétur Gunnarsson.

Our daily landscapes are full of pictures which are equally incomprehensible as a world of emblems from another culture, where an encyclopaedia is needed for a revelation.

There are no entries about the prosaic patterns that surround us, we just need to notice them, follow their movement.

The transformation of the snow forms is so quick that the generated pictures dissolve by degrees, and only one spot is left behind, dark or lucid, recessive and laughing.

The instability is casted onto our senses and one more pattern-picture is added to the collection.

A record of something we don't know what is, but still keep it and refine upon, for if one day,

it might open up for us a vision.

Oddny Eir
Translation by Ofeigur Sigurdsson

Some Thoughts on Mountains

"Mountains they have, instead of cities," wrote Adam of Bremen of the Icelanders in ad 1070. We Icelanders have, to be sure, acquired our own cities since then but they have never replaced the mountains. On the other hand, for centuries the mountains did service as visual art, so that when the first painters? hands lifted their brushes in Iceland it was the mountains that they portrayed, with a passion no less than that shown by European painters before them for the image of Jesus or the female form. So it's anything but certain that the mountains we meet in their natural surroundings are as untouched by the hand of man as they seem. They may be instead the carefully nurtured product of innumerable works of art. Whether cloaked in blue, dressed in green plaid, covered by a white shift or caught in the process of transition from one stage to another. Of the earth, yet at the same time belonging to the heavens.

Pétur Gunnarsson.

Written for the catalogue of Gudrún Kristjánsdóttir's

exhibition in Gerduberg, Iceland, 1996.