Arngunnur Yr's mastery of painting and the clarity of her vision
enable her to take risks that others shy away from. She does
not worry about the tension between accessibility and sophis-
tication, but simply embraces it. She looks for what is funda-
mental in our physical and emotional worlds, and then explores.
What does Arngunnur Yr find? This is not a simple question to
answer. Perhaps a better starting place would be to ask: What
do we as viewers find?

Technically, Arngunnur Yr's artworks tend to be oil on wood or
paper. Formally, her images are most often essentialized land-
scapes structured around a horizon line, with a foreground, a
background, and a sense of vast enveloping space. Arngunnur
Yr purposely chooses this comfortable and accessible image be-
cause of its seductive qualities. She is aware of what this land-
scape embodies, and chooses it to manipulate it. The use of such
a traditional landscape structure, with its attendant familiarity for
the viewer, frees Arngunnur Yr to push the limits of her painting
technique.

She uses a distinct palette that at first glance seems poetic and
refined, but in Arngunnur Yr's work, always beware your first im-
pressions. After methodically building up her landscapes with over
100 layers of paint, she often attacks the very surfaces she has
created. Working subtractively, she uses various techniques to
remove the finely rendered forms. This has the effect of revealing
the various layers of paint and exposing her labor, acknowledging
the element of chance and lack of control, setting up tensions as
the exposed colors often clash and undermine the very harmony
that she worked so hard to achieve.

Arngunnur Yr's works are extremely beautiful paintings, but they
always contain passages that are raw, exposed, and vulnerable.
In her process, she takes a seemingly perfect painting, attacks it,
and ends up with a more complex, subtle, and perhaps most im-
portant, human work. Her extra-ordinary painting technique allows
her to create a physical world; yet this same technique moves the
landscape from the physical world to one that is emotional, and for
many, spiritual. It is not the emotion of quaint harmony, but rather
a faith, hard-earned and then humbled. Her true insight is knowing
that what is most beautiful is perhaps not the most desirable. She
recognizes that the ability to paint images that are merely beautiful
is not enough, because in some fundamental way they deny that
which is most human. How is all this possible? Because Arngunnur
Yr paints with no fear.