The Galerie de Buci kicks off the spring season with an exhibition from the North, showcasing three Icelandic artists, two of whom are exhibiting in France for the first time.
In the shimmering colors that pierce the northern sky at nightfall, people have long believed they saw wandering souls. The Boreal Lights are said to be disembodied presences, manifestations of absence—a duality that is also found in the work of the three Icelandic artists featured in this new exhibition.
Each work holds a tension between embodiment and disembodiment, a conflicting dynamic that also describes the dialogue between the artworks themselves. The cool tones used by Ástríður Olafsdóttir, Reinar Foreman, and Björk Viggósdóttir emit a variable intensity of warmth, radiating within the human body or the celestial body, through trace or mass.
Ástríður Olafsdóttir (born in 1990) explores the Italian drapery technique to study the human body and its anchoring in space. Denying their original function, these dark shrouds reveal the body by covering it. Each fold in the fabric, every dip and crest, brings the body to life, exposing its intimacy without betraying its mystery. These sculptural yet evanescent presences are the only tangible elements within an otherwise abstract pictorial environment. They are completely anonymous, yet the artist manages to individualize them by the unique way the fabric molds to their forms. Through drapery alone, Olafsdóttir conveys emotions and attitudes: apathetic bodies evoke melancholy and disillusionment, while those in motion express resilience through struggle, a compressed force refusing to be held down. Ultimately, only the essence of vital energy remains in her series Magnet, where the outer shell is the sole trace of this force’s passage.
Reinar Foreman (born in 1993) captures symbolic bodies, immobilized in their image-being, and reanimates them with energetic strokes and a sketch-like style. Like a playwright, he transposes Greco-Roman myths into a language of immediacy. Structured around a dialectic of presence and absence, his works exist in a Baudelairean threshold space, between the immutable and the fleeting.
Bernini’s compositions are instantly recognizable, yet our perception of them shifts. Rendered in a way that evokes life-drawing studies, they become more accessible, less lofty.
Here and there, figures emerge from the depths of collective memory. Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius appear in a chromed yellow, as if pigment dust had been scattered over their specters. The Baroque intensity of the original references is heightened by an expressionist approach reminiscent of Bacon, while the fragmentary aesthetic makes the sculptural dimension dissolve, captured only in the fleeting instant of the gaze.
Björk Viggósdóttir (born in 1982) lays the final stone on the path to disembodiment. Her minimalist work is based on a dialogue between emptiness and fullness, evoking the principle of harmony in Taoist philosophy. On rice paper, a point of blue light maintains balance between the elements, a fragile yet necessary force of attraction.
The series Infinite Randomness challenges our perception and sense of stability. Blue and red threads bend porcelain pebbles, transforming their static essence. The wool animates the mineral just as blood circulation animates the living body. The stone, a symbol of immobility, becomes supple, changing, and therefore unpredictable. The simple gesture of the artist alters its fundamental nature, allowing the viewer to recognize familiar shapes in the fixed material—perhaps traces of fallen bodies or signs of invisible presences.
The Galerie de Buci with the support of Iceland Embassy in Paris invites you to discover these Icelandic artists at the exhibition at 73 rue de Seine in Paris from March 7 to April 5, 2025.
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