Sigurður Guðmundsson

Biography

In February 1969 Sigurður Guðmundsson’s first solo exhibition opened at Galerí Súm in Reykjavík. For it he wrote a manifesto, “A few words about art”: art, he declared, is not there to show the artist’s skill and is not there to delight the eye; it is a way of living.

He was born on 20 September 1942 in Reykjavík. His father, Guðmundur Árnason, made frames and dealt in pictures; his older brother, Kristján Guðmundsson, also became an artist. Sigurður studied at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts, by some accounts from 1960 to 1963, and then in Haarlem, at Academie ’63 (later De Ateliers ’63). In the mid-1960s he lived in the province of Groningen.

In 1966 he returned to Iceland with his wife and son and joined the circle of the Súm group. Its members had no common programme, but they shared the concerns of the international Fluxus movement: play and free experiment. In 1969 he also organised, with the Dutch Ministry of Culture, an exhibition of Dutch art in Iceland. In 1970 he left again and settled in the Netherlands, eventually in Amsterdam. In 1972 the Amsterdam gallery Now Construction showed his work “Untitled (Ice-philosophy)”: Icelandic sentences made of ice, which melted away during the exhibition. In the 1970s he worked on visual poetry, “observed poems”, performance “situations”, photography and sculpture. In November 1971, in Cornwall, he drew stones on a hilltop: “A Project for the Wind” followed the direction of the wind over four days. During the same visit, in response to the same changes of wind, he also made a sculpture. In 1976 “Wildzang” appeared in the Bijlmer district of Amsterdam: about 80 by 25 metres, made of 1,879 wooden posts that rendered a poem by Joost van den Vondel in Morse code. It lasted for less time than intended; since 1987 it has not been maintained, part of it has been taken back by nature and part removed by the city, and a few remnants can still be found.

From 1980 he has been chiefly a sculptor. Among his early works of this period are “Het Grote Gedicht” (“The Great Poem”, 1980–81) and “Stella Maris, Kantadorum” (1981). He divides his materials into heavy (basalt, granite, concrete, bronze) and light (glass, feathers, peat, seaweed); this has been seen as a union of a romantic view of rugged nature with poetry. From 1978 to 1986 he taught at the Academy of Art and Industry (AKI) in Enschede.

His works in Dutch public space include “Portret” (1986) in the sculpture park of the museum in Arnhem, “Pathos” (1987) at the Brabanthallen in ’s-Hertogenbosch, untitled works in Rotterdam (1988) and Almere, “Een gestolde herinnering” (“A Frozen Memory”), a war memorial in Middelburg (1990), “De ontmoeting” (“The Meeting”, 1995) in Gorinchem, and a work in the sculpture gallery in The Hague (1996). The largest of his works in the country is “Het rode geheim” (“The Red Secret”, 1998) on Hanzeplein, in front of the university medical centre in Groningen: a smoothly polished central figure made of ninety stacked blocks of red granite, surrounded by nine rough granite boulders. Its colour was chosen to match the red brick of the paving.

He has exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland. In 2000 he received the Adriaan Roland Holst Prize, awarded for the first time also in the visual arts. His first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom took place in 2003 at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. He lives and works in the Netherlands and China.