artist
Kristján Guðmundsson
- Iceland, 1941
For more than forty years now the Icelandic artist Kristján Guðmundsson (1941–2025) has explored different materials, colours and sounds so as to blend his ideas to form highly charged objects. His art is characterized by the application of aesthetics in which the concept is as important as the visual expression. In the severest minimalist spirit he purges his works of anything linked to his own self. He works with simple shapes forming part of a serial system or which are repeated in accordance with a mathematical principle. All that is extraneous is cut away. His works are executed with the greatest precision. His artworks are accordingly introvert – they represent nothing and exist only by virtue of themselves. They defy interpretation and proudly remind us that in minimalist art, theory is just as much the artist’s tool as paint and brush. Kristján Guðmundsson is self-taught. He is now active in Reykjavik after living and working in Amsterdam during the 1970s.