“Do you recognise these people? The faces are colourful and even though each has a distinct appearance they all look alike — and look like us. These are people on the street, inside their homes, in moving vehicles, family snapshots; apparitions.
From an early age Pálina was interested in taking photos of people, mainly portraits. The diversity and variety of the features caught her imagination and became inspiration for paintings. Since 1993 the artist has worked with faces, emphasising expression and expressing feelings through colours and pencil-strokes. The paintings are based on photographs of people who are (often) close to her, but the final picture is not necessarily similar to the model. Instead it is more of an emotional reaction to the photograph in the context of many other faces. Thus the paintings are not quite portraits, as defined by being a portrait of a named individual. Some of Pálina’s paintings are portraits of individuals, however, no names accompany the pictures (apart from references to family trees). Then it is the viewers to interpret the result, the painting, in a personal way and discern what is behind the mask.” – Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir.
Published on the occasion of an exhibition at Hof in Akureyri, Iceland, this work contains many reproduced paintings of colourful faces, each with their own character, accompanied by texts by the author and Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir in both Icelandic and English.
Cloth-bound hard cover, 26,5 x 21,5 cm, 102 pages, Akureyri 2022
ISBN: 978-9935-25-236-4
