D4 Daníel Björnsson

Daníel Björnsson (b. 1974) consecrates his exhibition space with colored light, blending color like a painter to recreate the world. Björnsson’s world is a garden plot wrought from light and from raw material that conveys the appearance of perishability and suggests the garden as a symbol of the self. Björnsson’s penchant for much-used symbolism finds expression in a tree built in the middle of the space, a tree which might be the Tree of Knowledge or equally the ash tree of Yggdrasil, rising through and enclosing Middle Earth in its roots and crown. The garden portrays a self-image that is perishable and perhaps rather distorted, as in the photograph of a German spy plane which appears in the work, drawn over the Reykjavik park Hljómskálagarðurinn in accordance with eyewitness descriptions. This distortion also emerges in the perennial loveliness of a Central-European ornamental garden, recreated beside the kitchen garden of an Icelandic farm. Similarly, contemporary self-image is based on our own localized reality along with the ideas that we nurture about international reality: a distorted image of our agency in the field of international commerce as well as art.

Daníel Björnsson earned his BA degree in visual arts at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in  2002 and has since been an active exhibitor in Iceland and abroad. In recent years he has contributed to the vigorous work of young artists in Reykjavik, both as a performer and a moving force in association with the gallery Kling & Bang.