Artospective: Portrait and Figurative Paintings by Bergthor Morthens.

The dream of Jonas.

An Interview with Bergthor Morthens.

Who and where are you from?

My name is Bergthor Morthens, I am from Iceland where I was born in 1979 and I am currently living in Gothenburg Sweden. I graduated from the Fine Art Department of the Akureyri School of Visual Art in 2004 and finished a MFA degree in 2015 at the Valand Academy in Gothenburg Sweden. I have been active in exhibiting and have had recent solo exhibitions in Iceland, Romania and Sweden and group exhibitions in Iceland,Denmark, Sweden and Greece.

How you got into this?

The original plan was always to do something practical but the pull of art and especially oil painting was always to much. There are a lot of artist’s in my family, musicians and visual artists so I always thought it was exciting as a kid. My original plan was to go into graphic design but thankfully I ended up in the Fine Art department and I really started to take it seriously during my final year at the Akureyri School of art. After that there was really no going back and there is a constant need to paint.

What is your’ driving force?

It is a need to deal with the world around me and the things that are happening in society. My works have an emphasis on politics and history and painting is a way for me to communicate my thoughts and feelings.It is a way for me to involve myself in the political transactions of my time, to share in power or affect change – for myself as a painter.

What kind of work you do and why?

My work has evolved around a fascination about portraiture and figurative painting with a particular emphasis on politics and history. In my paintings I challenge many of the criteria’s of the painting tradition and flirt with the grotesque. They have a ground in a more classical representative painting, especially within the portrait and figurative tradition. After having finished the painting in this representative style I continue with the work in another, more abstract and expressionist style, one that has references to the gesture-led field of post-war expressionist painting. A turnaround that calls for a new interpretation and a different narrative. The blotch of colour comes in as a separate action contaminating the portrait, almost cancerous, altering it in the process. It alludes to Chromophobia or the fear of colour, prejudice against colour which masks a deep fear of a contamination by the unknown. I‘m looking at colour’s role as a subversive way to challenge established hierarchies, and as a way of undermining authority.