CIA

New York-based Icelandic artist Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir participated this month in a benefit auction for the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art.The auction was held at the Robert Miller Gallery, New York, and featured some 40 artists, among them Andres Serrano, Paul McCarthy, Kiki Smith, Richard Butler, Ann Hamilton amd Thomas Hirschhorn. Þórdís has attracted attention on the New York scene for her shows at the Stux Gallery about which we wrote in our July issue.

Þórdís Aðalsteinsdóttir was born in Iceland and studied in Reykjavík and in New York where she graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 2003. She was offered an exhibition in Stefan Stux Gallery. Though fresh out of school, her work attracted attention and review. Writing in Art in America, Gregory Volk wrote that Þórdís’ paintings “quietly communicate a range of emotions or states of being, from painful loneliness to introspection, eroticism, whimsy and bliss”. The expectations of this first exhibition were borne out in her second private show in Stux’ new and expanded gallery in Chelsea.

Þórdís paints scenes of everyday simplicity played out in a fluid dream world, as though observed through half-closed eyes without commitment or concern. There is a great deal of drama in the situations she portrays but it is narrated with dry disassociation and with merciless disregard for the feelings invested. This, of course, makes the paintings all the more seductive, cool and somehow unapproachable. The surfaces of these acrylic paintings seem smooth and bright but reveal more details as one looks more closely, just like in dreams. The figures in her paintings are often inactive but seem to be seething with pent-up emotion – perhaps passion, perhaps mere boredom. When they fight, no quarter is given.

The complications of interpersonal relationships are a prominent theme in Þórdís’ work and can sometimes be said to border on solipsism. Yet her paintings describe perfectly familiar circumstances and in her last show she underlined the message with a video called “Woman Sitting in the Bathtub, Talking Like a Dog”. This showed herself sitting in a bathtub talking in Icelandic so the New York audience didn’t understand a word.