Photograph by Ásdís Ásgeirsdóttir, courtesy of Tibor De Nagy Gallery.
“I didn’t think I was good enough to be an artist when I was growing up,” Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson has said. “An artist was a person among the gods. That wasn’t me, and maybe I still think that.”¹ A great deal of Jónsson’s artistic personality comes across in this comment: both her essential humility, and her contrary instinct to realize an art that is indeed godlike in its perspective. She has lived for thirty years in Cleveland, but regularly returns to her native Iceland to collect images and new impressions from its glacial, volcanic landscape.
Her work, while abstract, is inspired by the subterranean and celestial movements of her home region—the flows of water and ice, the unearthly auroras of the northern lights. It draws equally on landscape and Color Field painting, and the history of tapestry, to powerfully sublime effect. Jónsson employs an extraordinarily laborious process, comparable to traditional double-ikat, in which she separately dyes weft and warp threads and then weaves them together to produce a unified image. This produces a slight blur, an effect that recalls digital pixelation, though it is achieved entirely by hand.
¹ Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (Skidmore: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2014), n. P.
Thingvellir Winterscape in silk and industrial dyes. Designed and made by Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson, USA, 2019.
114" L x 168" W
289.6cm L x 426.7cm W
FA144
Courtesy of Tibor de Nagy Gallery