When mountains move in Iceland, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. After all, elves might be living inside! Before undertaking major construction projects, businesses and government agencies usually check their plans first with an elf expert. In fact, the majority of the population believes that elementary spirits such as trolls exist, or at least doesn’t rule out the possibility. They are part of life on the harsh island just like volcanoes, glaciers and geysers. Where people are forced to do battle with the forces of nature, there are always some inexplicable phenomena, and where reason fails, fantasy and lore step in, to which Iceland owes a whole panoply of supernatural creatures.

Icelandic artist Sigga Björg Sigurðardottir (*1977) dips into this inexhaustible pool of mystical beings to pick out human behaviors and problematic emotions as central themes in her drawings, murals and animated videos. Like little hairy beasts, her impish creatures make all kinds of mischief, spilling bodily fluids in the process, gagging and spitting, dripping and drooling. Some of the scenes are quite revolting, and yet they express deep-seated emotions. The figures scream and cry, badger and torture one another.
“The contrast between horror and beauty and the state of mind you get in when you don’t know when something is disgusting, beautiful, sad or funny… Have you ever started laughing when something sad happens?”, so the artist.

A similarly queasy feeling and hard-to-describe mix of emotions arises when examining the assemblages created by the young German artist Latefa Wiersch (*1982). Like Sigurðardottir’s creatures, Wiersch’s objects also seem to emanate from a different, very mysterious world.
A protective lampshade shields the light shed on a pair of red shoes placed underneath it, from which an indefinable, fleshy mass oozes. In this work, titled “Heim” (Home), the impression is like peering into a hidden cellar corner or secret sleeping nook where someone has made their home and left behind some enigmatic clues. Associations with both cosy security and horror arise. Home, sweet home?
A little old wooden house prompts ambivalent feelings in those who enter, seeming by turns intriguing and somehow morbid. The viewer becomes part of the sculpture, intruding on the private realm of an absent inhabitant who has used red light for drama while creating a homey atmosphere with the belongings he has left behind.
In Wiersch’s hands, found objects become hybrid sounding boxes, overgrown with soft garments. They inspire feelings that fluctuate between intimacy and distance, provoked in part by the growling and wailing noises emerging at irregular intervals from inside.

With new drawings, murals and videos by Sigga Björg Sigurðardottir and intriguing objects by Latefa Wiersch, the dual exhibition “BEAST” launches an interesting dialogue between Iceland and Germany. Both artists experiment with melding contradictory notions such as good versus evil, beautiful versus ugly, scary versus pitiful, cute versus monstrous. While Sigurðardottir interrogates her Icelandic roots, instinctively putting her impressions on paper, Wiersch collects everyday objects which she turns into assemblages that function as emotional projection surfaces. Neither position leaves the viewer cold, both offering a chance to venture into the realm of conflicting emotions, between laughing and crying, fondness and aversion, pity and malicious glee.

 
 
 
 
 

Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir

"Paradox Parade"
Drawings

September 6 – October 20, 2007
- extended until November 15, 2007! -
Opening reception Thursday, September 6, 2007, from 6 - 9pm
Galerie Adler New York
 

Galerie Adler would like to introduce you to some of the most eccentric and beguiling creatures that you ever met. Artist Sigga Björg Sigurđardóttir shares her amazing creatures with New York through drawings, installation and animation.

With their often absurd gestures and facial expressions, Sigurđardóttir’s performers cavort across the paper in their colorful shimmies¸ hiked-up ankle socks and fluffy tutus. Disproportionate limbs add to these creatures’ comical yet fragile appearances, also highlighted by gently drawn tufts of hair, ominous puddles of ambiguous liquid and colouring directly reminiscent of blood. Indeed, the viewer feels abducted into the figures’ realm of emotions. Sometimes it seems they have just waded through knee-deep pools of blood in now stained socks. As the artist herself describes, “The contrast between horror and beauty and the state of mind you get in when you don’t know when something is disgusting, beautiful, sad or funny… Have you ever started laughing when something sad happens?”

Sigga Björg Sigurđardóttir is astonishing at creating a simulacrum to the world of our own, though these creatures feel, at first fleeting look, so far removed from our surroundings. Yet, there remains a mysteriously accessible relationship formed between the viewer and the works. For the viewer, the images of these creatures show a friend and a foe, a comic relief and a villain, the vibrancy of childhood play or the darkening presence of adulthood. These dichotomies provide an everlasting attraction to the reverberating unsettled voice that whispers visual expressions and excitement to the eyes.

Sigga Björg Sigurđardóttir was born in ReykjavÌk, Iceland and currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland and ReykjavÌk,Iceland. She graduated in 2004 with her MFA from Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland. She was rewarded in 2006 the Woollen Glove and the Svavar Gudnason painting award. Her work is represented in various Collections.

For further information please contact: Bettina Kames, Director New York.

Opening reception: Thursday, September 6, 2007, from 6 – 9pm


 

Sigga Björg Sigurðardóttir

"Slurpophobia"
Drawings

November 10, 2006 - January 6, 2007
Opening reception Friday, November 10, 2007, from 7pm
Galerie Adler Frankfurt am Main
 

Frankfurt, November 2006. There is something human about them, somehow. At times there’s a head missing or instead they have huge black muzzles, hardly ever do they have eyes but still they always seem to feel. What exactly is hard to determine, but one thing is sure: They feel something, something human, pain, mourning, affection, despair, confusion.

On warped paper, the creatures of young Icelandic artist Sigga Björg Sigurđardóttir (*1977, Reykjavík, Iceland) cavort in colourfully annulated shimmies, pulled-up ankle socks and fluffy tutus that raise the guttural sound generally reserved for the glimpse into a new mother’s buggy in most of the viewers. Still, the drawings are a long way away from belonging into a nursery, for when only watched long enough they begin to live, spew, drool, choke, crawl onto each other, finger, trample each other down, cause harm or just stand there mourning their dead.

Galerie Adler is proud to announce the first solo show of Sigga Björg Sigurđardóttir's hidden world in which these creatures with oozing jaws and hairy arms exist - a world on the other side of the looking-glass: The believe in elves, trolls and fairies doing mischief in the woods and harm to the people which is deeply rooted in the Icelandic mythology finds its way mechanically into the artist’s pictorial worlds: “I am very much Icelandic I think, and therefore my subconscious is full of what i learned and saw growing up in Iceland. I don’t deliberately try to do Icelandic things when I’m working. I just try to be honest.”

This honesty, a kind of self regard with safety clearance – for in spite of all, reason’s voice reminds you in the back of your head, the little wights are not real – the covered-up avowal of own mistakes and the search for one’s own standing the Sigurđardóttir’s drawings with the tales of mythological creatures. In sensitive yet ambivalent simplicity, the drawings look into contradictory emotions between laughing and crying, affection and disgust, compassion and gloating.

The fragile looks, the gently drawn tufts of hair, the ominous liquids, the colouring that might as well be socks as traces of wading through a knee-deep puddle of blood abduct th viewer into the realm of emotions. “The contrast between horror and beauty and the state of mind you get in when you don’t know when something is disgusting, beautiful, sad or funny. Have you ever started laughing when something sad happens? I have and I’m not proud of it…“

There is no huge stories, no string of successive actions guiding through the series. They come into being casually, gather like loose pages of a storybook all letters have disappeared from. The fight with the blender or tears shed over a broken washing machine – great gestures and heroic pathos are searched in vain in Sigga Björg Sigurđardóttir’s drawings. “When I am working”, Sigurđardóttir says, “I put all the drawings on the wall of my studio so little by little my walls are more or less plastered with drawings. The drawings affect each other and affect me when I am working on new ones. Each series then becomes like a family. It is not on purpose that one family has a lot of stripy clothes then, it’s more like a fashion in my studio at that time.”

It’s the everyday life, the usual, always a little surprising and always a little unnerving everyday life that the creatures have to cope with, sometimes funny, sometimes malicious, sometimes in entire resignation but always strikingly outspoken and without the façade of political correctness. They are snap-shots of a weird blend of emotions that goes beyond verbal description.

„I think we all mix up reactions to feelings sometimes. Also when you try not to think and edit yourself, which is the way I try to work, all your most extreme feelings come up and it is hard to hide it without lying. And I don’t lie when I’m working. The whole point is to be honest and tell the truth whatever it looks like.”