The forms in the paintings verge on formlessness – often so delicate and oft-duplicated as to become a texture. And texture itself is one of the most important aspects in the morphology of Guðrún’s art, especially striking in monochrome black and white pictures from her early career, where the thickly-textured surface is the meaningful aspect of the images. The works lie somewhere between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional relief, the flat canvas interacting with the three-dimensional element of the paint. 

A consideration of the nature and history of painting is one of the leitmotifs of modern art, and Guðrún’s works would be inconceivable except as a part of that process. Viewed from the perspective of the history of modern painting, it would be natural to classify her work as lyrical naturalistic abstract art, or to hang on it a label of minimalism, tachisme or all-over painting, but that also would be misleading. The paintings do not arise from a confrontation with the discourse of art history: they arise from a personal struggle with the material and its visual and morphological potential to reflect the creative energy and processes of nature. This involves a political dimension, as the works imply a clear attitude to the environment, a methodology which rejects the masculine values of modernism. The dialogue of the works with art history consists of confronting the concept of the creative power of nature in opposition to the creative power of man, assumed to transcend nature. Guðrún is captivated by the forms of nature, its colours and textures. Nature is her compass in the stormy seas of the discourse of art history. 

When Guðrún returned to painting with colours other than black and white, generally one colour at a time, this was in conjunction with the three-dimensional texture which is so characteristic of her work. The colour refers to a certain impression or force of nature; the works become organic, and an expanse of pattern seems to flow over the entire canvas. But the pattern effect does not only have a resonance in nature. It also recalls the continuous ornamental textures found in mass-produced wallpapers or upholstery fabrics, while evoking textures in architecture. Hence the works do not allude solely to nature and landscape, but also to the design tradition. 

Mass production of ornamental patterned goods for interior decoration started at the dawn of the industrial revolution, and as early as the 19th century it was criticised for superficialising the environment of modern man. All over the world, Art Nouveau movements strove in the first half of the 20th century to bring together art and craftsmanship, with the objective of counteracting the monotony of mass-produced consumer goods – of which the leaders of the movement strongly disapproved. They worked on the principle of a consistent work of art; all aspects of the home, furniture, utensils and even clothing should be in harmony, forming one work of art. Paradoxically this led to the widespread view that art, as conceived by the Art Nouveau movement, was degraded to the level of mere gaudy ornament.

This friction regarding repetition and ornament brings us to Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). He was determined to avoid ornamentation in his work, which focussed on necessity, idealism and purity. His work comprised clean lines – vertical and horizontal – and rectangular shapes. He used only the primary colours – yellow, red and blue – plus black and white. He avoided centralised composition and symmetry. He wanted to depict an inner, spiritual reality, not the manifestations of natural phenomena. He wanted to bring out the permanent, not the capricious; the masculine, not the feminine. He refused to use green, for instance, regarding it as a signifying nature.3 Yet in addition to his geometrical paintings Mondrian painted pictures of flowers, as his bread-and-butter work; he attributed this to another necessity, the needs of the body. Mondrian wanted to depict the finite, not the infinite, and hence he sometimes painted over the ends of the black lines at the periphery of his paintings, so that the pictures could not be interpreted as part of a larger entity, and hence reminiscent of ornamental art. He failed, however; not because he reduced his subjects to simplified forms, but due to his extreme purism, verging on the dogmatic, ultimately leading to pure pattern.4 In time Mondrian’s geometrical works gained popularity as models for design and pattern. 

In contemporary art nature is viewed far more favourably, and nobody is much concerned about the ornamental qualities of works of art. Purism is no longer the touchstone of aesthetics. The allusions to forms of nature in Guðrún’s art have quite a different significance from such allusions in early 20th-century art. They include mosses, algal masses, fungi and lichens in many forms, always alluding to the infinite, like a fragment of a larger whole. Green in various shades plays an important role in some of the paintings, along with red and blue. The colours are “woven” into the picture plane; the artist plays with transparency and flow. The colour evokes a variety of phenomena in nature, symbolic or visible, and Guðrún focusses on the surface of the earth, the first layer of “skin” which grows over newly-formed land. Here we see a semiotic system entirely different from that which typified the pioneers of modernism in art.