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18/5/2004

Two exhibitions

Art Museum Kjarvalsstadir, Reykjavik

New Works
Francesco Clemente
20. May - 22. August 2004

The artist Francesco Clemente is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. He started his career in Italy as a conceptual artist and had his first one-man show in Rome in 1971. At the end of the 1970s he began painting and quickly became recognised internationally. His work was included in some of the most important group exhibitions of that time such as: the Venice Biennale in 1980, Documenta 7 (Kassel) and Zeitgeist (Berlin), both in 1982. His work was then associated with that of fellow painters Enzo Cucchi, Sandro Chia, Nicola de Maria and Mimmo Paladino, among others, under the term Transavanguardia. This movement, alongside German Neoexpressionism, was central to a new interest in painting and European art in the 1980s.

Clemente visited India for the first time in 1973 and has spent long spells there ever since. He mixes Eastern and Western themes and symbolism in his work and his remarkable imagery combines the everyday with the exotic in a closely knit discourse. Consequently his images, at first familiar and direct, are ultimately mysterious. Clemente has used the self-portrait very often as a way to explore questions of identity, ranging from the sexual to the spiritual. However, his art is always open, suggesting rather than telling.

This exhibition that will be presented in the Reykjavík Art Museum is entitled New Works, and presents over sixty works including paintings, pastels and watercolours, all of which have been made in the last three years. This follows his major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Bilbao, (1999). In these recent works, we find fewer images of the body and the Vanitas has become the central subject. The format tends to be square and the palette is subtle and reduced, giving the images a sense of monumentality and peace. However, eroticism and violence do appear, creating powerful and haunting images.

Francesco Clemente lives and works in New York, but spends some time each year in Madras, India and in Rome, Italy. The exhibition New works is a joint project of the Reykjavík Art Museum and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Most of the works in the exhibition come from the artist, but also from the Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich in Switzerland and the Gagosian Gallery in New York and various art collectors, who have generously lent works for the exhibition.

Wednesday 19. May at 17
Kjarvalsstadir
Artist talk
Francesco Clemente talks about his career and works from the exhibition.
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Roni Horn
Her, her, her and her
20. May - 15. August

Foreign artists have visited Iceland from the 18th century onward and for many the country has been a source of artistic inspiration. Although the travels of those best known have generally made the news, Icelanders have hardly realized the full extent of the influence that the country, its environment and people have had on the foreign artists that have come here, influence that they have subsequently taken back home with them. Icelanders have always been a little surprised by - and secretly proud of - this attention; the visitors have been given the title "Friend of Iceland" both in jest and earnest, especially when it was clear that the country and its people had acquired an important place in that person's heart.

There is one Iceland-friend who has cultivated ties with the country and its people longer than most, yet who has chosen to keep a low profile here, despite the fact that over the past few decades she has been a rising star in the international art world. Artist Roni Horn was born in New York in 1955 and came to Iceland on her first trip abroad, in 1975. She has come here regularly since, looks upon this as her second home and has made a vast number of friends and acquaintances all around the country.

The first decade that Roni Horn visited Iceland one might say that she kept the country to herself and didn't really use it in her work. She travelled extensively and collected images first and foremost in her own mind and heart. Since 1988 she has often taken her camera along and photographed things that caught her eye, finding many subjects for her artwork along the way. The land has provided a venue for her ideas; simple and complex landscapes take on a unique and powerful presence in her work. Particularly memorable are her pictures of bubbling hot spring puddles and aerial photographs of glaciers that, when flattened, are almost unrecognizable.

Roni Horn
Her, Her, Her and Her
2001-2003
Roni Horn's work is characterized first and foremost by simplicity - nothing unexpected happens and everything is in balance. She creates her work in various ways; sculptures, drawings, photographs and text are among her forms of expression. Yet what her works have in common is serenity. Tension and anxiety are far away. Roni Horn focuses on her subjects, allowing nothing to disturb her, and this is communicated to the viewer.

The relationship between viewer and work is important to Roni Horn. She does not look at a sculpture or photograph merely as a work in itself, but also examines the relationship of the viewer to the work - not only intellectually, but also physically.

In Roni Horn's mind, Iceland is a certain counterbalance to the metropolis that is New York - and now, after a relationship lasting almost 30 years, she considers her visits here necessary to keeping her life in balance. Her work as it relates to Iceland is first and foremost in photographs and text, and various books have been published. The series To Place now counts eight books, all of which have Iceland as their focal point.

Water has fascinated Roni Horn since she first visited Iceland. Hot, natural pools found in various places throughout the country have appeared repeatedly in her work: hot springs, swimming pools and man-made structures relating to water. Her relationship to water is personal - she enjoys bathing in it, feeling its effect on her. One of her more memorable works is the photography series You Are the Weather from 1994-95, close-up facial portraits of Margrét Harldsdóttir Blöndal in hot pools throughout the country, where water, light and steam play a role as important as the unaffected expression of the model.

The indoor swimming pool Sundhöllin í Reykjavík has a starring role in a handful of Roni Horn's works. This remarkable building, designed by architect Guðjón Samúelsson and built in 1929-37, is a great favourite of hers and she has photographed it in detail. In the work exhibited here at the Reykjavík Art Museum, numerous photographs of the women's changing room are assembled like parts of a quilt. They are put together in a way that reminds us of our fragmented perception of the environment, through an eye that blinks constantly. The mysterious labyrinth of the changing rooms is hard to understand in these pictures, as it is even for those who are physically there. Through the photographs, Roni shows us the relationship between doors, doorways and walls that are constantly changing, because as soon as one space closes, another opens. White tiles of the simplest kind cover the walls, wrap around corners and over edges and give the entire space softness and curves. There is repetition in Sundhöll Reykjavíkur and this is reflected in the assembly of the photographs that are very alike - pictures of the same thing, and yet not the same. The assembly of the pictures into whole surfaces is also important to give the viewer a clearer picture of the space, which nonetheless continues to confuse him or her. However, it is not that Iceland itself is the subject of Roni Horn's work. Central to it is her own inner landscape, and in an interview with Jan Howard she says, "(tilvitnun)"

It is a great honour for the Reykjavík Art Museum to exhibit the works of this talented artist. The title "Friend of Iceland" is perhaps no longer fitting for Roni Horn; the vision of the country and people that is revealed in her work would suggest that she is not a guest, but rather one of us.

Exhibition in cooperation with the Reykjavik Arts Festival.

venue: Kjarvalsstadir
Flokagata, 105
Reykjavik

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