My Faroe-Stamp’s collection

Arts & Artists

Artists

 

Hans HANSEN

Zacharias HEINESEN

Ingalvur av REYNY

Ianus KAMBAN

The art of the Faeroe Islands, historically young and limited in its resources by a population of circa 500,000, has nevertheless demonstrated its own individuality and originality within the North European art, by which it has been evidently influenced.

The main feature of the Faeroese art, especially at its origin, is the love for landscape and nature expressed by the first painters already in the second half of the 19th century. The major artists of this early period are Niels Kruuse (1871-1951), Christen Holm Isaksen (1877-1935) e Jógvan Waagstein (1879-1949), self-learned and beginners, waiting for the first real Faeroese artist, Sámal Joensen-Mikines (1906-1979), who was the first to embrace art as a permanent profession, and that we can consider as the major exponent of the so-called “first generation”.

Sámal Joensen-Mikines studied in Copenhagen at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1928, and there he was taught by Aksel Jørgensen and Ejner Nielsen. To them, and especially to Nielsen, the Norwegian painter owed most of his symbolic expression, mainly consisting of portraits where death plays the main role. His “blackest” period was around 1934, when Joensen-Mikines had to suffer the shipwreck that saw the death of most part of the men of the Isle of Mykines, and the death of his father, whose funeral was later represented by the artist with great emphasis.

Even though some representations of the native village are serene and idyllic, tragedy and death are still the main themes characterizing Joensen-Mikines’s work.

Together with Joensen-Mikines, as “founding-father” of the Faeroese art, one cannot forget William Heinesen (1900-1991) from Torshavn, mainly known as a writer, but who was also a distinguished author of praiseworthy drawings and collages, and who set up his first exhibitions with the same Mikines.

From Mikines onwards, the Faeroese art blossomed by the end of the II World War, when many artists came back home from Denmark. Among them, the sculptor Janus Kamban (1913- ) was particularly relevant also as an organizer of art groups and exhibitions.

To the same period belongs the painter Ruth Smith (1913-1958), from Vagur, on the Isle of Suduroy, who, especially in the big portraits and in the self-portraits of the latest years of her life, bears some affinities with Munch’s artistic experience.

As the rest of Europe witnessed the flourishing of the “-isms” (Surrealism, Minimalism, Cubism), the great influence that the representation of nature still weighted on the Faeroese artists limited the diffusion of those artistic movements.

Jack Kampmann , whose works are mainly exhibited at the Art Museum of Tornshavn, is surely inspired by Cezanne, but no other artist will reach the analytic expression of Picasso and Braque. The works of the Faeroese artists will always maintain the love for nature and landscapes.

We shall also remember Frimod Joensen (1914-1996), with his representations of nocturnal and day landscapes, and Joannes Kristiansen (1918-1988), one of the few Faeroese painters that worked with Impressionist lights and atmospheres.

The “second generation” belongs to the years following the II World War, and saw in Ingálvur av Reyni (1920) its major exponent. Reyni initially followed the traditions of figurative representation of the landscape, although sometimes conceptually, until he ended up representing themes more and more abstractly, mostly inspired by the his mood rather than by nature.

Also belonging to landscape representation is Steffan Danielsen (1922-1976), who developed a style where the colors of the earth contrasted with the metal or the rustic structures: a melancholic view of nature that made Danielsen a peculiar figure within Faeroese art.

Hans Jacup Glerfloss (1937- ) expressed instead and elegiac attention to the life on fishing boats and farms.

Zacharias Hainesen (1936- ) transforms nature – although it is always recognizable – in geometrical figures. However, triangles and squares are always reconcilable to real elements in the landscape, as houses or mountains.

Thomas Arge (1942-1976) proved, in his short life, that the representation of Faeroese wilderness had many new possibilities, and he expressed them with various new devices.

The same tension towards nature is to be found in Amariel Nordoy (1945- ), whose representations seem to break and join back together in thousands of fragments. Nordoy painted coastlines, whose shape was fragmented in an infinite variety of lights and colors.

We shall also remember Oliver vid Neyst (1953- ), who was inspired by Cubist art and who illustrated many children’s books with pencil drawings, Torbjørn Olsen (1956- ), with his warm and intense display of colors, especially in his portraits, and Eydun av Reyni (1951- ), an abstract painter who uses the patters of the villages on the sea.

Trondur Patursson (1944- ), instead, brings sculpture on an experimental level, using whale skeletons, sea timber, rubble and wreckage, and glass.

Bardur Jakupsson (1943- ) has also various interests:  painter, illustrator, art critic and director of the Art Museum of Tornshavn. Jakupsson’s work always bears the influence of the wilderness of the islands and of the mountains more than anybody else does.

The contemporary artists (maybe the “third generation”), although not in opposition with the old masters, show an always-growing attention to human feelings and interior landscapes. Among the most interesting artists, there are Øssur Johannesen and Rannvá Kunoy.

 

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