Valgerdur Hauksdóttir’s career now spans more than two decades, decades that have seen significant transformations in Icelandic art. Valgerdur’s generation has taken on every artistic medium and even added more, though there are also those who have stuck to traditional media and continue to develop them and their own art, both technically and in terms of ideology and approach. Valgerdur is nearly the only one, though, to have made her mark in printmaking – a lone effort which must test even a printer’s ample patience.

From the start it was clear that prints suited Valgerdur: The abstract perspective demanded by a method where one works not on the image itself but on a plate or stone from which the image is then printed, also the precise sense for materials and the sheer daring needed to work in a medium that allows no mistakes. Technically, Valgedur has indeed contributed to the art and there is much in her methods and presentation that is wholly the fruit of her own research or experimentation and which we do not see in the work of any other printmakers – and not so many may have the technical knowledge anyway. But she has also explored the world from many other perspectives and incorporated them into her work. This can be seen both in her subject matter, whether abstract or not, even photographic – but also in her handling of the printed sheets, for example in works that are built up like collages, layer by layer, from gossamer-thin sheets of printed Japanese paper.

Printmaking has its origin in the fifteenth century which saw a renaissance in both art and technology. Printmaking was a way to mass-produce images for distribution. In recent years, however, most of Valgedur’s pieces have been unique, produced with a method that does not allow for multiples. Yet the core material is still graphic – images printed from plates that she reuses and even multiplies within a single piece. Every one of Valgerdur Hauksdóttir’s exhibitions is a report from an ongoing research project which does not permit time or energy to be spent on reproduction. She has gained a technical proficiency that allows her to take on subjects and conceptual problems that are as fresh to us as they are to her, nuances of our experience and dwelling in the world to which she brings as clear and incisive an understanding as we can hope to see anywhere.

 

Jón Proppé, critic and curator

(exhibition catalogue- Turningpoint, Hafnarborg, 2006)