hunt kastner is very pleased to present an exhibition of work by the Icelandic artist Sigurður Guðmundsson, organized in cooperation with i8 gallery in Reykjavik as part of the 2020 SUMO Prague gallery co-op event.
The exhibition, entitled “Journey of Being”, presents a selection of early works from the artist’s iconic series “Situations”. While the works from this series have been exhibited internationally many times over the years, they retain a timeless topicality, conveying a basic statement about the never-ending idiosyncrasies of human existence, to which we can all relate.
Imbued with a strong sense of the absurd and the whimsical, but also a distinct gravity and poetry, Guðmundsson’s work embodies a familiar mood of irony, melancholy, resignation and longing for flight. As a conceptual artist, Guðmundsson has worked in a wide array of media over the years – photography, text, sculpture, painting and performance. “Situations” are photo-based works because at that moment in time the artist thought photography was the most appropriate medium to give form to his ideas. The artist has repeatedly said that he doesn’t want these works to be viewed as photographs, that he considers them something more like visual poems “filled with memories and impossibilities”. The poetic always has been, and continues to be an essential pre-requisite for his work.
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