TEIKN
REYKJANESBÆR ART MUSEUM
2019, Reykjanesbær, Icealnd
TEIKN is the title of Guðjón Ketilsson’s solo exhibition in Reykjanes Art Museum, 2019. The exhibition comprised eight works, sculptures, and wall pieces, which were connected by a systematic presentation in the exhibition space, all of which revolved around symbols, their significance and “reading” in the widest sense.
At one end of the hall, Ketilsson had drawn or written in a new font, created by himself, the beginning of Genesis, one of the lynchpins of western culture. At the same time, the title refers to the work of the artist who had formed the story in figurative innovation. At the other end hung framed the yield of 19 months of labour, the transcript of all the Passion Hymns, each one transformed into a drawing on a piece of paper, mirroring Genesis, as similar technique was used to construct and deconstruct these historical texts. The long wall of the hall held a series of reliefs from cut wooden branches, dyed in blue ink and lined up to form unnamed poems and texts. This painstaking “nature font” referenced reading and a poetic perception of the world, which the audience filled in, each visitor “reading” them in their own way. Secondly, as seen in the catalogue, Ketilsson had got poet Sjón to look at some of these “poems” and translate them to Icelandic. On the floor stood clean-cut sculptures which the artist had formed and polished out of old furniture; cupboards and chests of drawers, transforming them into receptacles for books and stacks of books which had been shorn of their distinctive features but in the new, combined form they echoed architecture as well as referencing the repository of joint memories and symbols which books are.
Curator: Aðalsteinn Ingólfsson.
Photographs: Oddgeir Karlsson
To view curator Aðalsteinn Ingólfsson´s catalogue text TEIKN/SINGALS click here
To view FIVE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE LITURATURE OF TREES by writer/poet Sjón click here
