Ásgrímur Jónsson, Iceland

Poet of Light
9.2 - 23.3, 2003

Ásgrímur Jónsson is one of Iceland's leading landscape painters and watercolourists. He belongs to the generation of artists who started their careers early in the 20th century and paved the way for Modernism in Iceland.
His landscapes depict Iceland's fragile natural scenery and form a visual declaration of love for his subject. Jónsson's motifs are not the raw lava fields or the desolate landscape but rather his warm colours are used to paint the countryside extolled by the farmer and celebrated in romantic verse. Jónsson painted in both oils and watercolour throughout his life and his watercolours reveal the strong love he felt for his medium. His watercolours convey the range of daylight shifts of colour and the way in which they transform the landscape. They glow with lightness and poetry.

Georg Gudni, Iceland

Landscapes
9.2 - 23.3, 2003

Georg Gudni is a leading contemporary Icelandic artist. He started his artistic career in the 1980s and since then his native countryside had provided his constant inspiration. He is best known for his large oil paintings but his watercolours reveal a different and important side to his work. In them he explores the spartan Icelandic landscape - the contours of horizon and hills - and the atmospheric sensation it conveys. Through shifting colours he creates a sense of disintegration and endless expanses of view, and these imbue his work with a very special feeling and characterise all his art.

Lars Lerin, Sweden

Watercolours 1991 - 2002
30.3 - 25.5, 2003

Watercolour technique is a powerful tool in the searching hands of artist Lars Lerin. He is a master of its potential and submits to its capricious temperament. The subjects for his works he finds in the places where he makes his home. He grew up in the Swedish province of Värmland, close to the thick forests and where the long summer nights and the darkness of winter are a part of existence. On the Norwegian Lofoten Islands he discovered the sea and horizon. He has a feeling for the grandeur of natural scenery and a sympathy for the tough conditions under which people work there. In his paintings he returns time and again to how people live and work in home and factory. Memories, words, sentences and fragments of images recur frequently in his paintings; together they form a puzzle of memories which capture impressions of life and warmth such as perhaps no longer exist. It is a nostalgic, existential longing common to us all.

Views of Natural Scenery

30.5 - 31.8, 2003

What do we see when we study the landscape surrounding us? Views of natural scenery form the theme for 2003 summer's selection from the contemporary collections of the Nordic Watercolour Museum. The exhibition presented contemporary paintings with their roots in art history. And the view of natural scenery continues to fascinate artists today. Earth, air, water and fire are still all necessary for human life, but what is it that we actually see around us and why? What symbolic values do we attribute to natural scenery today, and are we able to distinguish differences between the Nordic countries?

Carl Fredrik Hill, Sweden

30.5 - 7.9, 2003

During his years of mental disturbance from 1878 to 1911 Carl Fredrik Hill made a large number of drawings which established his unique position in Swedish art history. The museum presented a series of his watercolour drawings never displayed collectively before. Hill often depicts mountainous country transmuted into forms of human figures. Through rapid and expressive line he achieves a degree of resolution and abstraction which make his work timeless. The series of drawings is the property of the Malmö Museum of Art.

Nordic Watercolour

30.5 - 7.9, 2003
 

Petri Hytönen, Finland
In big, playful watercolours Petri Hytönen catches the possibilities and impossibilities of fantasy and dream, sometimes seen through the eyes of a child. One imagines kinship with film language and inspiration from different parts of art history: the medieval painting, cubism and comic-strip drawings from today.

Exhibition catalogue available.

Glenn Sorensen, Australia/Sweden

Glenn Sorensen's watercolours are very subtle both in colour and expression. They are delicately painted with a strong translucent quality. His works are figurative with images taken from the personal world around him. They play with your senses and linger in your mind long after you have experienced them.

Exhibition catalogue available.

Ian Mckeever, England

Watercolour and Gouaches 1993 - 2003
14.9 - 26.10, 2003

Ian McKeever is a British artist who has quietly yet purposefully created himself a unique position in today's art world. With a growing confidence in the individuality of painting he works in gouache, watercolour and oils. The last ten years have been a creative period in his career as artist, and in the autumn exhibition at the Nordic Watercolour Museum we met eight series of works from this period on paper.

Exhibition catalogue available.

EVA & ADELE, Germany

Day by Day - Painting
9.11, 2003 – 25.1, 2004

EVA & ADELE afford us an insight into a previously little known aspect of their artistic creativity. This represents an essential element of the modelling of the 'image' of EVA & ADELE, which reveals itself in a multitude of pictures. These are often not only positioned at the media interface between photography and paintings or drawings in a wide range of formats, but also take the form of pure video or photographic work.

Exhibition catalogue available.