An Icelandic Cosmopolitan

The exhibition was first presented in 2004 in the Scandinavian House in New York.

Louisa Matthiasdottir, born in 1917, belonged to a new artist generation in Iceland and developed into one of the most important women painters of the country. She studied painting in Copenhagen, Paris and New York, where she lived and worked until her death.

Despite her international education and her participation in the emerging American art scene of the post war period, Louisa Matthiasdottir’s art reveals her as a very private person who focussed on her immediate family and close circle of friends and on the landscapes and views of Iceland, which she visited regularly throughout her entire life. Although her career spans a turbulent period of Western politics and art, her work is remarkably consistent and personal. Her aesthetic sensibility and her mastery of painting technique are fully developed already in her early work. And she continued to develop her own style independent from the art trends which so many of her contemporaries followed. Nevertheless, her paintings show a profound understanding of the concerns of twentieth century art. Today they remain as fresh and appealing as they were during her lifetime. The Embassy of Iceland thanks the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the family of Louisa Matthiasdottir for their cooperation and Landsbanki Íslands and Icelandair for their generous support.