Drawings in space, volume on the surface – Sigrún Ólafsdóttir’s sculptures and drawings to date could be summed up under this motto. The artist works with two media that seem to differ entirely in essence and appearance: sculpture and drawing. Sculpture signifies volume, space, matter, weight. Drawing signifies surface, linearity, lightness. Sigrún Ólafsdóttir’s combination of these aspects is groundbreaking: her sculptures are frequently light and transparent, her drawings heavy and compact. But this artistic approach is not revolutionary; it pertains to an established tradition. For sculptors in particular have been working with the two-dimensional media of drawing for a long time. Drawings often serve as preliminary designs and sketches for three-dimensional work. The unique quality of Ólafsdóttir’s artistic concept lies in her autonomisation of drawing, i.e. in her departure from using this medium purely for design purposes, although in this aspect too, her work follows a certain tradition.

What is important in this context is the significance the artist herself lends to drawing. After all, there is drawing and drawing; its connotations as a visual medium are multifaceted and it enjoys a rich past, for it forms the historic beginnings and the elementary basis of all sculpture. As the “archetype of all surface art” it deserves not only a place of honour within the creative arts, but it also enjoys a freedom other art forms do not: it is not bound to the domain of fine art. In addition to its artistic dimension, drawing can be described as one of humanity’s basic forms of expression, since it can be used as a tool for language and work even in mundane situations. This anthropological dimension is based on two fundamental circumstances: on the one hand drawing is the fastest and most direct creative technique of expression, and on the other it can serve its purpose as a means of communication and as an orientation-aid even on a simple level. We just need to think of a preschool child’s drawing in its function as a non-verbal form of communication, of the cave paintings in Altamira and Lascaux, of ritual tribal incision sketches, of medieval ground plans (for example the plan of St. Gallen monastery), or even, returning to mundane situations, of a hand-drawn map, of Ikea furniture assembly instructions, or of caricatures and pictograms.

Another feature of drawing is its function as a draft sketch without any ambitions to reach the realms of high art. In early Western art the initial design and the completed work of art stood in an entirely disproportionate relationship to one another. While book illustrations and murals were prepared with sketches, these were primarily considered to be technical aids; they were the preliminary (and subordinate) part of a whole. Drawing and painting were two phases of one and the same process. It was only during the Renaissance that drawing began to free itself from the bonds of this purely functional utilitarian union; in Italy artistic drawing won its independence through masters like Gentile da Fabriano, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Raffael or Leonardo da Vinci; in Europe north of the Alps artists like Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer or Wolf Huber set new standards by redeeming landscape and portrait drawing from their former servitude. Since then we have experienced two aspects of drawing: as a functional design medium and as a streamlined graphic pictorial concept.

Since the 20 th century autonomous sculptor’s drawings have also existed, i.e. a drawing made by a sculptor that is not to be considered a design for a three-dimensional object. We could mention Henry Moore, Richard Serra or even Alf Lechner as examples, who all fashioned an independent corpus of drawings with their very own artistic significance, although the boarders can become blurred when the idea for a design and autonomous character become interwoven, when a sketch and a sculptural artistic concept enter symbiosis. Finally it is the artist himself who defines the artefact. But this, too, is ultimately dependent upon the recipient and to what extent the suggestion is accepted – for an unambiguous definition of the “autonomous sculptor’s drawing” does not really exist.

At the dawn of the 21 st century there is also no clear and definitive meaning to the word “drawing”. A drawing need not necessarily be of a limited size, it need not be on paper, and it need not be drawn in pen, ink or chalk. It can also be large, it can also be applied to cotton instead of paper or card, and as in Sigrún Ólafsdóttir’s most recent works, it can be executed in India ink and gesso (chalk base) and hence acquire the quality of painting.

It is paramount to analyse the artist’s work under the two aspects of autonomisation and technical execution (while we will stick to the terminology of sculptural drawings). If we consider the entire corpus of drawings, three separate groups that prototypically reflect the artist’s development can be identified: the “Körbe” (baskets) series embodies the primary phase, followed by the “Linien” (lines) or “Berührungen“ (contacts) sequence, and finally “Windungen”(spirals) or “Bänder/Balken“ (ribbons/beams) represent the newest and current creative phase. The “Körbe“ (baskets), dating from the period between 1995 and 1997, certainly seem to reveal “classical” sculptural thought-patterns. The drawings, which are executed in India ink and linseed oil, mainly on 40 x 50 cm paper, still unmistakably speak the language of three-dimensional plasticity – not quite in the sense of a preliminary sketch, but they are to be understood as artefacts created in two-dimensional space and their central theme is the representation of spatial forms, of volume. Significant for this group is the frequent use of fine lines and the predilection for circular shapes. Finally, the drawings - even if they are certainly of autonomous character – seem to be spatial objects transferred to a surface, and a central object dominating the pictorial action can usually be identified.

This changes fundamentally in the next group of drawings “Linien“ (lines) or “Berührungen“ (contacts), which begins in circa 1997, running parallel to the sculptural work. These works are also primarily small-scale and the media are once more India ink and linseed oil. The novelty of the drawings pertaining to this creative phase, which the artist has not yet completed, is a reduction to compositional basics. Many pictures consist of no more than two lines approaching or crossing one another, sometimes against a background of criss-crossed or circular surface compartments that dominate the compositions’ generously ordered interior structure. The colouring is also discreet, confining itself to delicately applied tones of black and yellow. What is surprising and particularly remarkable for an artist who is representing the ideals of sculpture, is the total absence of any spatiality: the drawings are always surface-oriented, the third dimension is consciously obliterated.

In her current series “Windungen“ (spirals) or “Bänder/Balken“ (ribbons/beams), which represents a new artistic concept, Sigrún Ólafsdóttir creates a synthesis between the approaches described in the contexts of the other two work groups. In these works the dichotomy between two and three dimensionality, space and surface, sculpture and drawing essentially becomes obsolete, especially since the artist radically transcends the borders between painting and drawing. The works have been applied to cotton (i.e. canvas!) often in formats of 100 x 200 cm and 180 x 180 cm, and they have been leant the unmistakeable character of painting. Simultaneously, the artistic elements have been reduced: the pictures consist of widely spaced ribbons intricately highlighted by very fine lines. They appear to float freely in space, devoid of all gravity. The curved ribbons or beams move in groups, they overlap and intersect one another, sometimes they are translucent and airy, sometimes dense and powerful, they have no boundaries, they always surpass the confines of the canvas. These drawings, that all have analogies in the artist’s plastic works, create a virtual space, which cannot be categorised by any conventional method. Comparable maybe to the Czech painter Zdenek Sýkora’s pictures, where flowing colourful lines overlap and intersect one another, or the artefacts produced by the Swiss artist Beat Zoderer, who frequently employs “non-artistic” materials such as sticky tape, strings of wool or rubber bands, Sigrún Ólafsdóttir’s drawings generate a deep spatiality which defies any definitive form of interpretation. The artist consciously concentrates on a reduced colour scheme bordering on the monochrome, mostly in brown, grey and black tones: a method that lends her pictures further refinement. She designs completely wilful and ultimately unfathomable picture spaces, which can be considered a contemporary variant – and the comparison is more than legitimate here – of those imaginary, architectural scenarios mirroring an irrational and inaccessible system of interiors that were devised by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in his 1745 „Carceri d’Invenzione“.

Characteristic of all three work groups is the predilection for lines and curving patterns, while straight beams also appear in her latest works. The dominance of round or curving sequences lies in Sigrún Ólafsdóttir’s conceptual approach. She associates round and oval forms with spheres and circles, with the sun and the egg as donors of all being and creation. The earth is a sphere, in zero gravity liquids form circular shapes, the stellar systems are spirals and energy always develops in concentric circles. Circularity stands for creation, for warmth, for comfort, for harmony – and it is also the symbol of eternal recurrence and renewal.

Be it in her sculptures or her drawings, Sigrún Ólafsdóttir’s artistic systems always deal with the balance of movement, with the equalisation of opposing principles, with the synthesis of motionlessness and dynamism. Just as a number of her sculptures maintain an apparently impossible equilibrium, so the individual elements in her pictures support one another. Without doubt all her two-dimensional works exude a high degree of balance and contemplation, they perfectly harmonise rational calculation and creative fantasy. If one were to seek their deeper meaning, one would be doing them an injustice, for they are also autonomous, i.e. independent works that need no underlying philosophy, no specific ideology, no utopian design and no explicit behavioural instructions to justify their existence. Rather, they follow their own inner system, impervious to outside occurrences or influences, they are enough in themselves, they unite problem and solution in one.

All the artist’s drawings exude a powerful aesthetic presence, which is undeniably engendered by their clarity and the frugality of the employed creative media. With just a few compositional elements she succeeds in creating pictorial spaces that are characterised by a tense dynamism on the one hand, and an almost meditative sense of peace on the other. Sigrún Ólafsdóttir’s drawings acquire their very unique charm both by means of their aesthetic impact and by the process involved in deciphering the riddle of their underlying system and their interior and exterior structure. As these cannot always be recognised immediately, the viewer finds himself mentally reconstructing the artistic creation process.

Richard W. Gassen