10. January - 15. February 2009  

Icelandic Artists - Jónatan Grétarsson

Jónatan Grétarsson is a young photographer who has this last year taken photos of Icelandic artists. The exhibition consists of 40 portraits of well known contemporary artists from all aspects of the arts and each depict an interesting view on lots of artists who have an effect on their contemporaries. Jónatan uses the contrast between black and white to display these in a series of impressive photos.

 

Icelandic artists is an ambitious and long term project where Jónatan is documenting contemporary Icelandic artists. He has taken photos of more than hundred artists of all ages from all areas of the arts. The exhibition at Hafnarborg is the first in this theme and the first step of many where Jónatan takes on the portrait theme.

Jónatan Grétarsson (born 1979) finished his photographers rights ‘Sveinspróf’ from the Reykjavik Technical College in 2002 then he moved to America to study at the International Center of Photography in New York. He has participated in many combined exhibitions with the Journalistic Photographic Society in Iceland and he has worked as a photographer for many magazines besides managing his own studio.

Character studies by Jónatan Grétarsson

Early in the twentieth century, photography took over the documentary role that had belonged to the visual and narrative arts. Photography changed our perception of reality. And along the way people started to consider photography a mechanical process, a branch of mechanical engineering. Thus we more often than not think of a photograph as evidence of reality or even a stand-in for reality: a reality that one can mirror, measure, or confirm. And this even in the age of Photoshop, when few photographs circulate unaltered. Photographs are all around us and they scream at us from every direction. But when are they art and when not? A photograph is a medium in the same way as oil on canvas. Photographs and paintings become works of art if they show or represent something that exists beyond the visible part of reality; when we no longer see just the surface, and start to experience something breathtaking. Of course, photography is unique in its ability to capture the superficial appearance of the world around us. None of the tools of the visual arts do so better. But photography does more than that.

Portraits too can turn into works of art: pure political art and icons. It was Andy Warhol who took black-and-white pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Mao and Beuys and turned them into icons. The character studies of Jónatan Grétarsson (b. 1979) are full of nostalgia and of references to the history of photography in the twentieth century. They are not unlike the material that Andy used. Jónatan documents Icelandic artists, some of whom are familiar, in color, from the world of Icelandic glamor magazines. Color photography is great for glamor magazines. But a black-and-white photograph can turn into an enduring icon. Jónatan's hard, direct light marks out his subjects and pulls on them so that they seem to be coming out to meet the viewer. The view of them is forbidding - no smile, faded color, regret and nostalgia. “Where did the days of your life lose their color, and the poems that rushed from dream to dream through your blood,” as the poet Jóhann Jónsson wrote. Jónatan has developed his documentary method into a high art. His photographs' presence is such that the viewer is brought into the journey and tempted to go through the mirror into that other reality which is full of symbols, icons which have gotten stuck in the upside-down inner world. It is no easy task to come back, so powerful is the experience. We really do see with our minds.

Guðmundur Oddur Magnússon