Bikini Tree

Since her graduation from the Iceland University of the Arts in 2000, painting has been Hulda Vilhjálmsdóttir’s principal medium, but she has also made spatial works of various kinds and installations, as well as performance art, and published illustrated volumes of poetry. In addition she ran a gallery for a period of three months as a performance-art project: the Angelica Smith Gallery. She has gone on to pursue diploma studies in clay modelling and ceramic at the Reykjavík School of Visual Arts. In 2007 Hulda was nominated for the Carnegie Art Award and in 2018 for the Icelandic Art Awards for her solo show Valbrá at the Kling & Bang gallery. She has been extraordinarily prolific in her art, and in 2020 she won the Living Art Museum prize Tilberinn. She has developed a highly personal imagery in which women play the leading role. In Bikiní tré/Bikini Trees we see headless women in bikinis lined up like anonymous trees in a wood. The repetition of forms creates a rhythm and depth in which the blue-painted bikinis on pale bodies establish distance, like faraway mountains, in contrast with the dark ones in the foreground. A dense network of tiny dots extends over the picture plane, intensifying impact of the surface. Sometimes we do not see the wood for the trees, while in her art Hulda may be said to scrutinise manifestations of women, and what it is to become and to be a woman. She explores the subject through herself and her immediate community, with emphasis on the manifold poses which women take up. She applies lyrical expression boldly, utilising the potential of the painting, the hues of the colours and brushwork which is raw, fresh and at the same time refined. In recent years she has also presented images of nature in powerful lyrical abstract works.