Current artist in residence Gudrun Westerlund (SE) introduces her latest work through a pop-up exhibition and video artist talk, set in Skaftfell’s gallery, which is closed at the moment due to COVID-19. The video has been posted on Skaftfell’s Instagram and Facebook pages:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=926205317831042
Gudrun Westerlund is an artist based in Uppsala, Sweden. She is most of all a painter, but also works with land-art and other art-projects. Gudrun mixes abstraction with more figurative and narrative expression. In Iceland, she has worked with ink and watercolour, and has ventured into land-art using snow and ice. Gudrun has a deep interest in nature and landscape. It is present in her art, and grounded in her upbringing in northern Sweden, with a closeness to water, mountains and forests. She is interested in the contrast between nature and civilization.
Gudrun has been artist in residence at Skriðuklaustur during March and has then come to join the Skaftfell residency program in April. The two different places in East Iceland have inspired her to continue her way of getting to know a place by walking around, looking, taking photos, sketching, thinking, depicting the landscape, at first in a realistic way, then continuing more freely with blending her own experiences and ideas with what she sees around her.
Gudrun Westerlund has exhibited mostly in Sweden, but also in Norway, Latvia, Finland, Germany, USA, Japan and China, and has taken part in a group show at the Nordic House in Reykjavik in 2017. She recently received a two-year grant from the Swedish National Fund for the Art (Konstnärsnämnden), for 2019-2020.
