Iris Kristmunds

Iris Kristmunds builds paintings the way you'd build a structure. Blocks and columns stack across the canvas; fine black crosses and rings are drawn over the top, holding everything in register. Then the discipline loosens — a color breaks its box, a mark lands where the grid says it shouldn't — and the picture stays alive rather than settled. She has said that some of the works are admittedly engineered, coming out of her background. She's right, and the engineering is what the freedom pushes against.

That she's Icelandic isn't incidental. In her own words: "The rawness of Iceland's nature has a considerable influence on my art, and the cold and dark everyday life also evokes a joy of color in my artworks." It explains a catalogue that runs from graphite and bone white through to emerald green and grids of color at full strength.

Before she was a painter she was head of IT at an Icelandic bank. An electrical and computer engineer by training, with a master's in technology management, she spent more than fifteen years running technology teams — the kind of always-on roles that leave little room for anything else. In the winter of 2019/20 that pace caught up with her in what she now openly describes as burnout, and she left the bank.

Painting began a few months later, during the leave that followed. She was weighing yoga and swimming when the idea arrived, went out and bought canvas, paint and brushes, and meant only to decorate her own walls. Friends began asking her to paint for them. She has made hundreds of works since. "Art is my mindfulness and way of disconnecting myself from everyday life and cultivating myself," she says.

She describes herself as "an engineer and a self-taught artist from Iceland" — true of the training, if not quite of the inheritance: her grandmother is an artist. She paints from Reykjavík, where she lives with her husband and the family dog, Lubbi, and runs an advisory practice she co-founded: a career reshaped on her own terms rather than abandoned.

Art House SF is proud to have given Iris Kristmunds her first exhibition, in Unexplained and Invisible, a two-person show of Icelandic abstract work with Kjartan Guðbrandsson. "Iceland is a small market, so I would like to take my art more internationally in the future," she told us in 2023. This is the beginning, we hope, of that chapter.