VIDEO: Sigurður Guðmundsson-There Is No Visual Language

“Every new work requires a new language”. Meet Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðmundsson, whose life in art expanse over more than 60 years. In the video, he shares his philosophies on art and love. “My way into art started with completely failing at everything else.” Sigurður Guðmundsson never succeeded in school and worked in forests around Iceland from a young age. One day, through his father, he met the principal of the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, who helped him get into the school. Since then, Guðmundsson has been working with art. “I’m the type of artist that has no plan,” he explains. “I desire something that is on the poetical side.”

Sigurður Guðmundsson’s most famous body of work is a series of photographs which he calls ‘Situations’. “I have no connection with photography,” he says and continues: “I didn’t feel it as photography. I felt it more like sculptural or poetry.” Thus, he sees the works more like poems than traditional photography.

As an Icelandic artist, poetry and literature is inevitable, according to Sigurður Guðmundsson. “Language is very dominant by us, the Icelandic artists. Our main culture, when it comes to art, was poetry in this country. Everybody was a poet.” According to Guðmundsson, the visual arts are still a very new thing in Iceland, so he experiences that he and his peers went into the visual arts with a “literary attitude”, as he calls it. “I always denied it when critics were talking about the visual language. And I said: No, there is no visual language,” he continues, “Every new work requires a new language.”

Sigurður Guðmundsson (b. 1942) is an Icelandic artist who lives and works between Xiamen, Amsterdam and Reykjavik. He studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and Academie ’63, Haarlem, in the Netherlands. Inspired by the Fluxus movement and painters of the natural world, including Caspar David Friedrich, Guðmundsson conveys longing and a search for a better world in his works, which range from photography and painting to sculpture and text. In his “Situations” series, the artist placed himself in illogical situations to comical yet melancholic results. Sigurður Guðmundsson has had many solo exhibitions, including shows at Galleri Andersson/Sandström, Stockholm, Sweden; Levant Art Gallery, Shanghai, China; Galerie Martine et Thibault de la Châtre, France. He has also participated in multiple group exhibitions, including shows at i8 Gallery, Reykjavik; Moderne Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland; Weserburg Museum für modern Kunst, Bremen, Germany; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA.

 

Sigurður Guðmundsson was interviewed by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen at his home in Reykjavik, Iceland, in May 2023, Camera: Simon Wehye, Archive footage: ‘Portrait of An Artist’, 1982, by Dutch television NPS, Edited and produced by Roxanne Bagheshirin Lærkesen, © Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2023. Louisiana Channel is supported by Den A.P. Møllerske Støttefond, Ny Carlsbergfondet, C.L. Davids Fond og Samling, and Fritz Hansen