This is an Icelandic name. The last name is patronymic, not a family name; this person is referred to by the given name Kristján.
Kristján grew up in Iceland. His father owned an art supplies and framing business. Poets, musicians and visual artists were frequent visitors to the family home. Kristján left his school in Reykjavik at sixteen, started to train as a pilot (he did not obtain his license), and tried his hand at various jobs. He encountered the art scene via his brother Sigurður, who had attended art school. When Sigurður moved to Amsterdam in 1963, Kristján paid him a brief visit. Kristján travelled to the US the following year, where he created mixed-media works in a distinctly Pop Art style. His first solo exhibition in Reykjavik was held in 1968. His works at the time were indebted to Pop Art but with a tendency towards simplification and systemization.
The founding of SÚM (Samband Ungra Myndlistamanna – Association of Young Visual Artists) in Reykjavik in 1968 marked a turning point in contemporary Icelandic art. Kristján and his brother were co-founders. SÚM tended towards the then current, international trends such as Fluxus, Arte Povera, land art and conceptual art. The group was also in close contact with the German artist Dieter Roth, who was then living in Iceland. Roth introduced the artists to concrete poetry, amongst other things. Kristján exhibited an ironing board covered in chicken shit at the SÚM gallery in the summer of 1969. Taking Roth’s motto to heart, he created art with whatever he could find.
Kristján followed his brother to Amsterdam in 1970, a city that was then a hot bed for conceptual art. That same year, he co-founded the Silver Press with the writer Einar Már Guðmundsson and published Performables and other pieces, a box of cards with instructions for performances. In 1971, Kristján became the administrator of the In-Out arts centre in Amsterdam, working alongside Sigurdur, Michel Cardena and Pieter Laurens Mol, amongst others. He published two artists’ books the following year. In Punktar / Periods, he reproduced the ‘magnified silences’ of the full stops in a collection of poems by the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness. In Nidur / Down, he printed lines corresponding to the distance between the highest mountain peak and the deepest seabed.
Kristján started to explore the medium of drawing in 1972. It remains one of the principal themes in his art. He devised a way to make ‘supersonic drawings’ by firing a gun in parallel to a sheet of paper. The bullet’s trajectory created a line drawing of burnt gunpowder on the support in 1/1500th of a second. The equal treatment of idea, creative process and result acquired new importance. Kristján published the artist’s book Circles on the occasion of his solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 1973. To make it, he threw pebbles into water and photographed the circles and ripples that they created; the pictures were printed on paper as heavy as the pebble that caused the ripples. The work captures the moment between cause and effect.
A scholarship enabled Kristján to stay in Amsterdam until 1979. He later stated that it was a time in which he “wanted to capture the tension between nothing and something.” His work Equal Time Lines can thus be read as his attempt to give plastic expression to time. After returning to Reykjavik, the artist represented Iceland at the Venice Biennale in 1982. He increasingly stripped his drawings of any emotional expressiveness and focused on the materials in their ‘zero state’: just paper and pencil or graphite. Starting in the late 1980s, Kristján presented compositions of graphite volumes, sometimes combined with stacks or rolls of paper, but at other times not. He reduced drawing to just the presentation of its material qualities, thereby indicating that it contains infinite creative possibilities. Kristján continued to work on tightly structured compositions of lines and grids, in different materials, into the 1990s and the turn of the millennium.
