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Götumynd - Hús í Grímsstaðaholti

Götumynd - Hús í Grímsstaðaholti

Nína Tryggvadóttir


  • Year : 1940
  • Height : 45.6 cm
  • Width : 54 cm
  • Category : Málverk
  • Sub-category : Olíumálverk

This painting by Nína Tryggvadóttir is one of her most famous from the period 1939-43, and it was the piece that attracted especially great attention at an exhibition of her works at Unuhús in Reykjavík in 1942. Hrafnhildur Schram says of the painting: “The houses and roofs are primarily interpreted as solid and unbroken planes of colour. These are Cubist forms, simplified and devoid of details, the window- and doorless houses look more like Monopoly houses than people’s homes. There is also more life in the colour and the brushwork is more vibrant than in her earlier work. Nína has understood that flowing light must be interpreted with strong colours. The houses in Grímstaðaholt are snow-white and ochre yellow, the roofs bright red, the shadows dark blue and the ocean a deep blue. Here Nína creates tension with the interplay of light and shadow and strong colour contrasts, thus bringing the whole piece to life. By her show at Unuhús, Nína marked out her own place among Icelandic artists...” (Hrafnhildur Schram: Nína í krafti og birtu/N. Tryggvadóttir- Serenity and Power, p. 17). Björn Th. Björnsson writes about this period in Nína's work in his art history: “A dominant feature of her style is her perception of the subject in whole planes of colour; here she becomes the builder, with her building bricks and her trowel in hand. The same can be said of her paintings of clusters of houses: they are an arrangement of blocks of colour, where the character of the street or neighbourhood is not a function of the windows, chimneys and gardens, but by the overview of the man-made landscape and the “soul” that she reads from it... There is no reason to be coy about these works of Nína’s: they were radical in their innermost nature, her confrontation with the nuanced naturalistic representational painting which typified the general artistic taste of Icelanders at the time” (Björn Th. Björnsson: Íslenzk myndlist á 19. og 20. öld (Icelandic Art in the 19th and 20th Centuries) II, p. 276, 278).

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