Karen Ösp Pálsdóttir: Blá Bergmál / Blue Echo I Þula Hafnartorg
"By limiting herself to a single color, she flattens complex visual fields, drawing attention to tone rather than color contrast, simplifying form to its essence and inviting viewers to perceive the world through a singular, monochromatic lens - almost like a blue filter."
Karen Ösp Pálsdóttir’s solo exhibition, Blue Echo, explores her ongoing monochromatic investigation into cobalt blue, a color she has worked with almost exclusively since 2019. Though Karen has lived in the United States for the past twenty years, she has spent the last six months in Reykjavík, where she created the majority of the works presented in this exhibition.
Cobalt blue, historically regarded as “the perfect blue” and ideal for painting the sky, plays a central role in Blue Echo and serves as a unifying element in Karen’s exploration of surface and composition. By limiting herself to a single color, she flattens complex visual fields, drawing attention to tone rather than color contrast, simplifying form to its essence and inviting viewers to perceive the world through a singular, monochromatic lens - almost like a blue filter.
The exhibition features meticulously rendered details in paintings where faces and objects are distorted through transparent forms such as droplets, plants, and ribbons, all based on three-dimensional models. Karen transforms these digital forms into soft, glass-like surfaces that disrupt and fragment her imagery, which often originates from various portrait photographs of herself and her close ones. This approach seeks to bridge clarity and distortion, creating a visual tension between what is seen and what is sensed, between the familiar and the intangible.
Karen Ösp Pálsdóttir (b. 1992, Reykjavík) is an Icelandic painter working primarily in oil on canvas. Her practice is grounded in realism, yet often veers into surreal, dreamlike territories. Blue dominates her palette - used not only as a colour, but as an atmosphere through which her subjects emerge, dissolve, or fragment. Faces are mirrored in water drops, distorted through glass, or hidden behind delicate patterns, imbuing her portraits with a sense of mystery, melancholy, and transformation.
She holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore (2013) with a minor in art history, and has lived and worked between New York City and Reykjavík in recent years. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with solo and duo exhibitions in Reykjavík, and numerous group exhibitions across cities including New York, Washington DC, London, Paris, Barcelona, and Annecy.
Karen’s paintings have also appeared in prominent publications such as New American Paintings, Create! Magazine, SFMOMA, Hyperallergic, Tibia Magazine, and El País.
