Margrét H. Blöndal

Most often the drawings are composed of a figure or form isolated on the page but with a surrounding halo of olive oil. Blöndal starts each drawing by looking at an image - most often on the computer screen - yet during this process her focus becomes increasingly intent and singular. The thing which is being looked at ceases to be as it appears. The very act of looking shifts its sense and abstracts it from the world.

The work fluctuates between representation and abstraction, yet never exactly being one nor the other. There is only just enough information present, and a sufficient amount absent, to cause us to withdraw from acknowledging with certainty what we are seeing. Instead, the drawings are almost architectonic in their setting, there is a physicality to the oil on the paper which demarcates a natural boundary. It is an actual presence, a saturation of a surface—the page is not merely a site of imagination and project, it is material fact.

The drawings are not overly constrained; the hand of the artist is evidently present. Further contributing to this is a colour palette that is both muted and reserved, where the forms at times can feel almost washed out of their colour.

Margrét H. Blöndal’s work teases at the edges of sense and the familiar. The world is gently nudged, not to make it allegorical but to expose an essence and to concentrate the way in which we look upon it. It exposes a poetry of the unexpected, and is an antidote to the restless mind which continually seeks meaning and reference.