Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson : Core

Kjarvalsstaðir

For over fifteen years, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson (b. 1963) has merged painting and weaving, creating paintings on hand-dyed, woven silk thread. Hildur’s paintings begin from images of the singular landscape of Iceland; addressing numerous Icelandic landmarks, she has created series devoted to Vatnajökull, Iceland’s largest glacier, and Hekla, a stratovolcano that is one of the country’s most active.

The exhibition features a selection of Hildur’s large-scale woven paintings made on a three-meters-wide loom, as well as several newly created pieces.

Twice a year Hildur returns to Iceland, taking photographs as she hikes through the landscape. Details of the photographs, from mountainous silhouettes to glacial crevasses, become isolated, cropped, and enlarged as Hildur transfers the imagery to woven paintings in her Cleveland studio. This complex process includes hand-dyeing the threads before weaving together the warp and weft. In the process, Hildur’s original sources are abstracted, as the paintings suggest a range of imagery from nonrepresentational lines and shapes to elemental forms, such as cells, rocks, and galaxies.

Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson is a two-site exhibition. Part of the exhibition is shown at the Tang Museum in New York from 17 August to 29 December 2013.

Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson has received numerous grants, commissions and awards, including the prestigious Cleveland Arts Prize in 2008, Ohio Arts Council Grants, and a public commission from the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. In 2004 Hildur was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship by the Ohio Arts Council and the same year was commissioned to create works of art to be presented in that year’s Governor’s Awards in the Arts.

Her previous exhibitions include The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, William Busta Gallery, Cleveland, and numerous galleries and museums in Iceland.

Her work resides in a number of collections, including The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Reykjavík Museum of Art, The Progressive Insurance Collection, and Cleveland Clinic Foundation. Born in Reykjavík, Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson has lived in Cleveland, Ohio for thirty years. From 1983 through 1985, Jónsson studied architecture at Kent State University before switching her focus to studio art and studying at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Later, she returned to Kent State, where she received her BFA in 1991 and MFA in 1995. Programme

Sunday 9 February 3 p.m.

Artist‘s talk with Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson.

Sunday 30 March 3 p.m.

Gallery talk with Anna Jóa artist about the exhibition

Sunday 11 May 3 p.m.

Gallery talk with Ragna Sigurðardóttir writer about the exhibition..