Exhibition Opening – Unndór Egill Jónsson and Ásmundur Sveinsson: After the Blizzard

The exhibition After the Blizzard of works by Unndór Egil Jónsson and Ásmund Sveinsson will be opened in Ásmundarsafn on Saturday, 10 September at 14h00. Chairman of the Culture, Sports, and Leisure Council
will open the exhibition.

In the heat of the moment, it’s often hard to see how things really are. When things calm down, there’s a chance to reflect and see the big picture. This is also true for the turbulence inherent in art creation. This exhibition is a meeting between two artists, Ásmundur Sveinsson (1893-1982) and Unndór Egill Jónsson (1978). Among other things, these two artists share their use of material, the movement in their works, and both are, in their creations, inspired by nature.

Unndór Egill Jónsson's material of choice is Icelandic birch, which he uses to create large installations, sculptures and furniture. In this exhibition, he has two large pieces: on one hand a manmade tree with an eternal cycle of a kind of snowfall, and on the other, the equivalent of an iceberg or rather the bottom half of an iceberg, the part that is usually not visible. Unndór’s work is often humorous and playful but beneath lie speculations about the position of nature and life on earth during the uncertain times of the present Antropocene.

Ásmundur Sveinsson was among those who introduced Icelanders to new ideas in the art of the 20th century, he took part in the development, progress and technological advances that modernism brought. The exhibition title comes from a letter Ásmundur wrote to his mother from Copenhagen in 1920, where he describes a piece he is working on as depicting “a dead body, half-buried in snow”. Unfortunately, the work is lost but he called it After the Whiteout. In the context of the exhibition, the whiteout can be interpreted as the boom and the expansion of the industrial revolution and modernism that is reflected in Ásmundur’s art. The ideology of this period begat the environmental chaos we now face and Unndór deals with in his work, among other things.

Curators are Aldís Snorradóttir and Edda Halldórsdóttir.