Love, Laundry Bear: Thordis Adalsteinsdottir Solo Exhibition 索迪絲．阿德丹斯多堤個展：愛與洗衣熊

Exhibition

Thordis Adalsteinsdottir is an Iceland-born, New York-based artist. Graduated from Icelandic Academy of Arts in 1999 and as a master of New York School of Visual Arts, MFA Program lin 2003, she has held exhibitions in numerous countries and received international praises. Influenced by pop art, minimalism, expressionism, and other alternative art movements, Adalsteinsdottir's signature style is composed of deflated background created by neat, horizontal brushes and repeated handmade wallpaper pattern like thematic melody. Revealing cruelties in adult world with fairy-tale-like elements, she expresses emotionally charged moments in calm manners, and carries profound existential interrogation with scenarios deprived of depth. Absurdity, melancholy, indifference, and dream-like atmosphere with coercion of diverse components become her artworks' key.

Not only do the new works on the exhibition extend the "Adalsteinsdottir style," but they are also a series of painted stories created by the artist's naivist, poetic mind. It allows the paintings to remain light and colorful while disclosing the grotesque sides under contemporary prosperity with surrealist scenarios between sweet dream and nightmare.

"Yes, I would say there's a lot of New York in my painting. It's funny, because in Chelsea they talked about that there's so much space in Iceland, and how that's the reason for the isolation in my work." Said Thordis in an interview in Reykjavikgrapevine twenty years ago. Perhaps it is thanks to the isolation that the artist could always depict of the contemporary existential crisis with sober eyes. Profound pursuits under superficial surface, restless emotions under indifferent tone, versatile contents under strong, unified style, Adalsteinsdottir's artworks blend reality and fantasy. They are created by a sensitive soul craving truth, a solitary mind contemplating life .