Katrín Sigurdardóttir

KATRÍN SIGURDARDÓTTIR May 29 – July 3, 2009 | 11 Rivington St, NY

Eleven Rivington is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Icelandic artist Katrín Sigurdardóttir, on view from May 29 - July 3, in conjuntion with Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NY.  This ambitious double-venue presentation marks the artist’s New York gallery solo debut.  The artist exhibited a major large-scale room installation first shown at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, which then traveled to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 2006.  More recently she participated in group exhibitions at SMAK Museum for Contemporary Art, Ghent; Des Moines Art Center, IA; Reykjavik Museum of Art; MAC / Museo de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo; and Luhring Augustine, NY.

Sigurdardóttir mines territories of landscape, architecture, space and memory, subverting our desire to name and locate how we experience places in general, and art objects in particular.  The artist makes sculptures and interventions in various media and large walk in – and up and down and out – installations that invite movement and viewer participation.  With an economy of means and a light touch, she engages in a playful dialogue about knowledge and observation, what it means to have our feet on and off the ground and, sometimes, our perceptions turned upside down.

At Eleven Rivington, a single large-scale installation will fill the entire the storefront gallery.  A room within a room, the piece engages and confounds the viewer’s expectations of seeing and experiencing a three dimensional structure – in this instance a life size replica of a royal palace guardhouse.  Approached from a mock side-entrance that is actually blocked by a pane of mirrored glass, the piece employs shifts in scale, theatrical lighting effects, and tricks of perception to question our understood notion of seeing and reflecting, both literally and metaphorically.  What we expect to see and what we actually experience becomes a playful and dramatic excursion.

Four sculptures will be featured at Greenberg Van Doren, on view from June 18 - August 21. Megastructure (2006), a tower comprised of six tiers of landscape reaching almost seven feet, allows the viewer to experience the varying topography from both above and below. The piece’s dense physical presence is contrasted by each of its intimate and meticulously miniaturized vistas making the viewer feel both physically dominant and diminutive at the same time.  In Haul XX (2009), Sigurdardottir confounds the viewer’s assumptions as an ordinary wooden art shipping crate opens to reveal an intricate mountain landscape made of resin and pigments.  Through her manipulation of scale and vantage point, Siguardardottir invites the viewer to explore her elaborately constructed worlds that are both immediately identifiable and completely foreign at the same time.

Katrín Sigurdardóttir currently lives and works between Reykjavik and New York.  She has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in the past ten years, including solo shows at Galleri Maze, Turin; Gallery i8, Reykjavik; Galeria Leme, Sao Paulo; and Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain de Bourgogne, Dijon.  Her awards and residencies include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant, and residencies with LMCC Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Art OMI International Artists Colony.