Stux Gallery is pleased to present the first New York exhibition of paintings by Icelandic artist Anna Jóelsdóttir. Jóelsdóttir’s body of work investigates time and space, and how through abstract painting these concepts can be stretched, compressed, reordered, multiplied, and broken apart. Her energetic layering of hard-edge stripes, stenciled shapes, freehand markings, and ink smudges evoke themes of detachment, rupture, and separation, suggesting a spatial dislocation where connections are broken, paths severed, and empty white space prominent.
Jóelsdóttir compares her artistic practice with that of a writer or composer who creates, rearranges, and imagines time and space with words and symbols, only her tools are color, line, and form on a flat surface. The collision of ordered and chaotic fragments in her large- and small-scale paintings and ink drawings suggest both natural landscapes and architectural forms as seen from multiples perspectives. Her work reflects her personal encounters with urban and pastoral landscapes, from the aggressively vertical lines of modern skyscrapers to the horizontality of a lake or a wooden fence. Jóelsdóttir´s concern with direction and thrust can also be seen in the various shapes and orientations of her canvases.
Jóelsdóttir´s paintings demonstrate moments of bold clarity and passages of explosive uncertainty, producing a sporadic rhythm against a stark white background of raw gesso. “My paintings are visual journeys through space and time. Time and space are intertwined, are mutable, just as they are in life. They can also be removed, as they often are in memory. The fragments distort vision,interrupt time, echo space like our memories do. They become a personal space/time in a world where time and space are no longer centered.”