Handled no 21

Ragnhildur Jóhanns (b. 1977) lives and works in Reykjavík. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the Iceland University of the Arts in 2010. Her practice spans a range of media, including painting, drawing, collage, printmaking and sculpture. Her subjects often emerge from everyday objects and still life, where familiar forms are given new life through colour, composition and unexpected juxtaposition. The real and the dreamlike meet in her work.

She is particularly drawn to the way ordinary things can take on new meaning when placed in another context, or approached through play with colour, form and proportion. Ragnhildur has exhibited widely in Iceland and internationally. Through her work she seeks to create a visual space that invites the viewer to pause, to look again at the familiar, and to find their own connection to the form, colour and mood of the piece.

Ragnhildur Jóhanns
I am a surrealist, and have been one longer than any single subject has lasted me. In recent years that has taken the form of still life, and the form suits it, a table, a flower, a fruit, a hand. Few elements, high precision, no narrative to hide behind. In each painting there is a hand or two, always cut at the wrist, never joined to a body. It holds a fruit, rests against glass, lifts a cherry into the air. Has no clear purpose but rearranges or disrupts the sill of the still life, giving it it pulse.

I don ́t aim at realism in my painting but go close to it. Everything in my painting behaves almost correctly. That is the place I am interested in, and it is not confined to tables and flowers. Still life is where I work now because it gives me the fewest objects and the most quiet in which to let the error show. When it stops serving, I will go elsewhere. The logic travels with me, the subject does not.