Thordis Adalsteinsdottir at Stefan Stux

This was the first New York solo exhibition for Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, an impressive Icelandic painter fresh out of the graduate program at the School of Visual Arts. Adalsteinsdottir's 11 spare acrylic paintings on canvas or wood panel, all from 2003, mostly feature solitary figures set against subdued, yet eye-catching, monochrome backgrounds. These background colors, including soft purples, russets, beiges and light grays, suggest emptiness and gorgeous distance, perhaps inspired by Iceland's hinterlands, while also alluding to the special house colors one sees in Reykjavik's old downtown section. Adalsteinsdottir's vaguely elastic figures with elongated legs, offkilter proportions and contorted postures inhabit a peculiar zone somewhere among realist figuration, cartoons, anime and pure fantasy. They also quietly communicate a range of emotions or states of being, from painful loneliness to introspection, eroticism, whimsy and bliss

With Ana and Butterfly, a barefoot woman wearing pink pants and a snug, dark blue turtleneck kneels within a blue-gray expanse, but she could also be miraculously levitating. Her miniaturized right arm, with spindly thumb and splayed fingers, seems at once grotesque, vulnerable and oddly lovely; then again, her whole slightly rumpled posture conveys a mix of ungainliness and grace. While this figure holds a small butterfly in her hand, the scene is anything but sentimental. Instead, her riveting expression (part stoic reserve and part rapt attention) and her extra-wide, blazing eye, which you see in profile, indicate an inner life buffeted by fear, compassion and wonder. Adalsteinsdottir is an exacting painter who builds up her works from tiny lines and thousands of mostly horizontal brushstrokes. Everything about this fastidious technique communicates flatness--an absence of illusionistic depth--and reserve, yet the paintings traffic in intense, if understated, psychological states.

Throughout Adalsteinsdottir's work, around-the-house situations possess an aura of magic and fantasy, and suggest folkloric narratives reaching way back into history. In Grandmother in Blanket, an elderly woman wrapped neck to ankles in a puffy blanket lies on a bed, but she could just as well be caught in a snowdrift or about to take flight on a cloud. As a small circle floats nearby, she clutches a mobile phone, perhaps to call someone for assistance. Otherwise she is alone in her bedroom world, and as she looks out through another wide eye, you guess she's also gazing inwardly, where the deep secrets are. Elsewhere, a nude man apparently spilling down from a hammock; two identical facing figures that are half woman, half animal; and another vaguely alien-looking woman twisting to display a dirty foot, both charm and disturb.

--Gregory Volk

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group