Ólöf Nordal’s exhibition, Blirds, in Ásmundarsalur is an installation with sculptures, text and sound. Ólöf Nordal has for long worked with bird images in her work which are often rooted in folklore, image building and contemporary culture. Blirds are bronze casts that portray figures in transformation. Their transition suggests morphing from human form to bird form, from the earthly to the spiritual. The Blirds belong to the world of the grotesque and the uncanny, but also refer to migrating birds who fly over the sea in the shape of a bird as well as in human form. The work is in dialogue with Nordal´s latest work Human Birds (2022), located in the garden of Móberg nursing home in Selfoss.

In her work Ólöf Nordal deals with Icelandic history and the collective memory of a nation in a critical and analytical way. Her artistic research has been focused on the self-identity of a nation in postcolonial times, the origin and the reflection of national motifs in the present, and the fragment as a mirror into the past.

Ólöf Nordal studied at Iceland School of Art and Craft, with further education in the USA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and at the sculpture department of Yale University. Nordal has a long carrier in the arts and has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. In 2019, Reykjavík Art Museum hosted a retrospective of Nordal’s artistic career with the exhibitions Úngl in Kjarvalsstaðir and úngl-úngl in Ásmundarsafn. At the same time, the museum published a book on her work. Ólöf Nordal has made a number of works in public spaces. Her latest works are the environmental project Þúfa (2013) located by the harbor in Reykjavík, Hella Rock (2020) in Portland, Main, Eye (2021) in Hamrahlid College and HumanBirds (2022) for the nursing home Móberg in Selfoss. Ólöf Nordal is a professor of Fine Art at Iceland University of the Arts.

see more at https://olofnordal.com/