++++ Anna Gudmundsdottir spent the last few weeks before the opening of Manifesta as if she was in an ivory tower. Enclosed in the new tract of the Städel Museum, she worked on her wall-painting covering several rooms, surrounded only by projectors, buckets of paint, paintbrushes, a photocopier and innumerable reference works.
The drawings of the artist who was born in Reykjavik in 1974 are composed of various illustrations which have only the single common feature that they come exclusively from a non-artistic context. The artist composes graphics from user manuals, anatomical drawings and advertising illustrations to form an anarchic comic whose plot does not function according to narrative criteria, but rather according to associate and intuitive impulses.
After she had done her work, Anna had to ask the supervisors by knocking to let her out of her dungeon with a flesh-coloured grounding coat. In this way, an unintentional inversion of a strategy which she had practised previously came about. In Bergen, namely, for some time, Anna Gudmundsdottir's artistic strategy was based on the art of burglary. A total of seventeen times, she broke into the local concert hall in which artists such as Oscar Peterson, Count Basie, Yehudi Menuhin and Nick Cave had already performed. There she gave night-time performances on the concert grand piano for her friends and acquaintances to which she also once invited the press, which however reacted incredulously or with reservations.
She herself also had to draw the attention of the local media to her theft of the bust of the composer, Christian Sinding. No one had noticed that it was placed in her living room window, just a few meters away from the concert hall.
The works of the artist, who today lives in Oslo, are characterized by a pronounced sense of absurd humour which is accompanied softly by a melancholy irony. An energy-charged mixture for which not all of her patrons show understanding. For a Norwegian energy provider, Anna Gudmundsdottir once drafted a wall painting which showed a father and son playing on a carpet. The two of them pull good-naturedly at an oversized power point, each armed with a screwdriver. The draft was rejected. hoh
Städelsches Art Institute, Holbeinstraße 1