Sigurdur Gudmundsson (1942)
Sigurdur Gudmundsson has compared his work to taking a trip through time and space. His photographs and sculptures render the most fleeting instant of an idea, thought or feeling visible. In that moment, he finds freedom, and hopes that the viewer will also allow himself that freedom. His work is anything but a statement or a coded language of images with a 'solution' like a puzzle.
Alternating between studios in the Netherlands, Iceland, Sweden and China (Xiamen and Beijing), Gudmundsson produces poetic images that play out in the field between nature and art. He is perhaps best known for his extensive photographic series, Situations, in the nineteen seventies, in which he depicts an abstract sensation or idea by photographing himself and individual objects in a (usually typically Dutch) landscape. Since the nineteen eighties, Gudmundsson's work has been primarily sculptures in bronze, Chinese lacquerwork, steel, granite, peat, wood and brick. His sculptures have a powerful impact because the artist breaks his subject down to a recognisable fundamental form. The essence of a house is a peaked roof atop a cubic volume; a head is suggested by the line of forehead to nose to chin. Language is also a fruitful domain for the artist; in one work, Gudmundsson captured words like 'good, bene, gut' in porcelain and hung them on hooks, as if inviting the viewer to put the words on like a jacket.
