Bárður Jákupsson

In his abstract works Bárður Jákupsson combines the nature of art and the Faroe Islands. The works capture a constant changeability and transience, while their expression ranges from expressive, powerfully emphatic painting to more lyrical watercolours.

Exhibition 25 August - 21 October

Bárður Jákupsson was born in Tórshavn in 1943. When the painter himself describes the basis of his work, he refers to the dizzying experience of a small boat in the unfathomable depths of the ocean, situated under a lofty rocky coast, whose crags stand out in dramatic silhouette against the red evening sky. It is enough to take anyone’s breath away, but also a position that does away with traditional central perspective and unleashes abstraction.

As Director of the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, for decades Jákupsson has been an indispensable and key figure in the cultural life of the Faroe Islands. Since leaving his post at the Museum in 2003 to devote himself wholeheartedly to painting, there have been several exhibitions of his monumental oil paintings. Their immense pictorial planes are rhythmically divided by vertical formations with dynamic zigzag patterns in intense spectral colours, balanced by cooler, bluish shades and earth colours.

During these years he has also perfected his unusual, small, light watercolours, which in several cases appear virtually non-figurative with organic, flowing lines, a shifting intensity of colour and, as a result, varying effects of light.

- Kinna Poulsen