Louisa Matthiasdottir

"The reason I paint is because I want to paint what I see. But to paint what I see I must build from color. I don't see shapes and colors without seeing them in nature. Either it looks like a landscape or it doesn't. After all a painting isn't really a still life or landscape, it's a mere canvas. It can never be real life. It has to be a painting."

Louisa Matthiasdottir was born in Iceland in 1918, and lived in Denmark and Paris before coming to New York in 1943 where she studied at the famous Hans Hofmann School. She began showing her paintings after the war at the downtown Jane Street Gallery in New York and for many years she had regular exhibitions at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery on Madison Avenue. Over the second half of the 20th century, she would have well over 50 acclaimed exhibits in some of the world's most prestigious galleries.

Writers on art from Hilton Kramer to John Ashbery have praised her work in such venues as The New York Times and New York. And though Matthiasdottir's kitchen still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and Icelandic landscapes received extensive critical and popular attention in her lifetime, a new audience was she received greater renown later in life when her work "House & Sheep" was used on the book cover of Halldor Laxness' Independent People. 

Matthiasdottir died February 26, 2000, in Delhi, NY.

Matthiasdottir's estate is represented by the Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, which have graciously allowed failbetter.com to display these works.