Gabríela Friðriksdóttir: Gabríela

For nearly two decades, the Icelandic artist Gabriela Friðriksdóttir has incorporated a wide variety of media – from drawing, painting and sculpture to performance, experimental music and video installation – in a body of work that systematically draws on a singular aesthetic philosophy. Hers is a world tending towards Surrealism, peopled with hybrid and sexually charged beings that can be read as metaphors for ancient and fundamental human emotions, such as melancholy, pain and the impossibility of breaking out of individual inner isolation.

Her most recent body of work, a large group of over fifty paintings on canvas, may seem at first view to be an accidental exception to this aesthetic strategy due to its “domestic” familiarity. As in her drawings, which are strictly limited to the use of India ink, Friðriksdóttir establishes a vocabulary of symbols, forms and figures, which, paradoxically, appear both isolated and marked off on the coloured canvas and, at the same time, harmoniously embedded in this emptiness.

Her paintings could be described as “mental landscapes” which persistently attempt to visualise anew, from the depths of the unconscious, conditions that are in a constant state of uncertainty. The combination of two elements are significant in many of the works: Friðriksdóttir relishes the use of pastel and bright colours in a way that opens a debate around taste but also evokes the “childish”; secondly, as if intensifying this impression, she employs iconographic elements that find their origin in naïve paintings such as those of Henri Rousseau.