Over the past fifteen years Nordhøy has been creating mesmerizing, shapeshifting work that takes the viewer on a visual odyssey during which the eye is never allowed to settle. Her abstract paintings and drawings play with the physiology of sight and the psychology of perception and make us aware of the very act of looking.

Nordhøy’s painstaking images are a model of manual dexterity and find their source in the contrast between stability and instability. They are predicated on a disciplined and methodical approach to picture-making and create something harmonious from the unrefined chaos of everyday life.

For her first-ever solo show in Iceland the artist presents five new pieces: a site-specific wall painting in acrylic, an oil painting on Mylar and three oil paintings on linen. 

These poised and elegant pieces reflect a fascination with the interplay between material flatness and optical depth, but their systematic exactness is illusory for all of them are generated intuitively by hand using brushes, rollers and varying widths of masking tape.

’The structure of the work is governed through repetition and rhythm of line,’ says Nordhøy. ‘[But] what is important is that I am fighting a logic, breaking up a pattern, working against an order.’

Kristin Nordhøy was born in Oslo in 1977 and graduated from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts with an MA in Visual Arts in 2006. She lives and works in Oslo and Edinburgh.