Þorvaldur Skúlason (1906-1984)

Þorvaldur Skúlason was born in Borðeyri in western Iceland. He entered the Royal Academy in  Oslo in 1928. His principal teachers were Axel Revold and Jean Heiberg, both former pupils of Henri Matisse. In 1931 he went to Paris, where he studied with Marcel Gromaire and frequented the school of Fernand Léger. He exhibited with the Scandinavian group Koloristerne (The Colourists) in Copenhagen, with strictly composed paintings of ships, harbour scenes, interiors and bleak wintery landscapes. After his sojourn in Denmark, he spent a summer in Sicily but moved again to Paris in 1939, by when he had adopted a formal, semiabstract style with a heavily impastoed, tactile use of colour.

Skúlason moved to Iceland in 1940.  Here Skúlason soon became the leader of a younger group of artists, and in 1947 they formed the exhibition group Septemberhópurinn (The Septembrists), which launched a purely non-figurative and later concrete style using pure two-dimensional colour. The group´s four annual exhibitions were the cradle of modernist painting in Iceland, in sharp contrast to the expressionist, Romantic, landscape tradition. During the following years Skúlason took part in many foreign exhibitions. In his later years he turned from static constructions to dynamic cyclical compositions, influenced, according to the artist, by speed and the modern awareness of movement in outer space.