Þórður Hall
Þórður Hall has always used nature as his subject, and in his screen prints made between 1979 and 1987, that subject was the geometry of the Icelandic landscape—conical mountains, waterfalls, and glaciers simplified into basic forms and colors.
Screen printing is an old Japanese printing technique in which a fine-mesh screen is stretched over a frame. The screen is masked so that ink can pass through specific areas, with different colors then printed one on top of another. The resulting surfaces may overlap, align, or allow the paper to show through. In his screen prints, Hall prints up to ten frames with great precision. By arranging areas of color side by side or layering them on top of one another, he manages to create an extraordinary range of different tones.
Back in the day, Þórður Hall was said to have captured the modern age’s mechanistic attitude toward nature through his geometric prints.Today, however, his screen prints have taken on new dimension in the digital era. The geometry that once referred to the interplay between nature and the man-made world is now reflected in a growing tension between the handmade and the digital. As nature and technology compete for our attention, we welcome every reminder of the physical world. We seek out deviations from technological perfection because they are signs of the human, the unexpected, and the unpredictable, which we miss so much in the digital age.
“I tried to imagine what it was going to look like, but then it could turn out completely different if, perhaps, the colors didn’t mix the way you wanted them to. Then you tried to save it somehow, and something even better might come out of it,” Þórður says of the process of making the works.
Simultaneously, the works evoke imagery familiar to us from computer screens: pixels, dotted lines, and basic geometric forms that appeared in the early days of computer systems and digital drawing programs. The visual language of geometry, which we once associated with industrialization and urban life, mutates and resurfaces in the digital revolution around the turn of the millennium, and then follows us into the age of artificial intelligence and automation.
Þórður Hall is born in Reykjavík in 1949. Þórður Hall studied at the Reykjavík School of Visual Arts 1966–67 and the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts 1967–72, then pursued further studies at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts 1972–74. Þórður taught at the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts for many years and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the Nordic countries and elsewhere in Europe. His works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Iceland, the ASÍ Art Museum, the art museums of Reykjavík and Kópavogur, Norrköping Art Museum, and the Swedish Art Association.
