The works of northeast Ohio-based artist Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson have been widely seen here, at places such as the former William Busta Gallery and Abattoir Gallery in the Clark-Fulton neighborhood. She’s also exhibited in California, New York, North Carolina and Florida, as well as her native Iceland, where she spends part of each year.
It’s Iceland’s distinctive landscape that inspires her evocative abstract textile pieces that are part painting and part weaving. She uses photos and watercolors as the basis for her images, painting on silk and weaving her hand-painted threads.
She’ll now be having her first show at Chicago’s Andrew Rafacz Gallery, 1749 W. Chicago Avenue, on the city’s near northwest side. Titled Glacial Landscapes, the new works draw on images of a glacial lagoon in the southern part of Vatnajökull National Park. The show’s statement says “Her psychedelic color shifts and patterns of interference, which can be seen in the Northern Lights or the mineral traces of geothermal activity, speak not only to the environment’s visual drama but also to its precarity—landscapes on the verge of transformation or disappearance.”
It opens on Friday September 12 and will be on view through November 1. She’ll be doing an artist talk at the gallery on September 21 at 1pm. Get more information here.