Hlynur Hallsson (*1968) lives and works in Iceland and Germany. Language and communication play an essential roles in his practice as an artist and curator, and in his work, which moves across mediums, from sprayed texts and installations to performance and photography. Through conceptual and purposeful multilingualism, Hallsson explores the semantic difficulties of communication surrounding a work of art and the cultural preconditions of, and multifarious opportunities for, interpretation. He has exhibited solo exhibitions at Kunstraum München, Kunstverein Kassel, Reykjavík Art Museum, The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas, Overgaden, Copenhagen and is represented by Kuckei + Kuckei gallery, Berlin.

The first of Hlynur Hallsson´s trilingual spray-works arose in the year 2002 for an exhibition in Overgaden/Copenhagen. In these, Hallsson united elements of text, statements and the fleetingness of modern-day art. His reciprocal multilingualism does not represent a mere translation, however, but rather – in this case – with a discursive entree with a cultural difference: Islandic – the artist’s mother tongue – stands for every original human language. German may well be considered vicarious for all elaborated languages of the “poet and thinker”. And in any case, there is no way round the international lingua franca of English: the global lingua franca per se. The fleetingness of the works is achieved, on the one hand, by using spray paint – a material that has been dismissed for quite some time as having no artistic expression whatsoever. And, on the other hand, by the fact that, in every exhibition gallery, space must be found for the New. Nothing really endures in the halls of the art galleries; all works find themselves in a constant flow and drift from one place to another, whilst some pass away, only to be resurrected elsewhere.

When he occupies himself with the subject of “the word as image”, he shows his exhibition Þetta er það – Das ist es – This is it (Kuckei+Kuckei, 2015), a work that apparently deals with the basis of written language. His alphabet of the Icelandic language consists of 32 characters and unites the familiar with the alien. The familiar characters offer the viewer the sense of recognition, while the unknown letters bear within themselves the promise of something new. The work is like an invitation to grasp both the origin and the home of these symbols. It is a return to the very core of things, comparable with his earlier photo-text works, which serve in places as a fragmented diary and, at the same time, as their antithesis. Here, too, Hallsson uses spray paint to emphasise the element of transience.

Jill Leciejewski