Tolli: Fingraför árstíða / Marks Of Seasons · Þula

Where Seasons Meet
Text by Daría Sól Andrews

There is a unique kind of light in the Icelandic highlands in June. Summer blooms in the valleys, yet snow still clings in the creases of mountainous rock. A ridge line holds both seasons in the same breath. Sunlight stretches without urgency. For a moment, you are suspended between them. The air is thin, almost lucid. Alone, but not lonely. It is from this altitude which Tolli's paintings emerge.

In June, Tolli walked the Hrafntinnusker-Landmannalaugar trail, crossing high ground where seasons overlap. Below, the warmth of summer draws the call of familiar summer birds in the air, light spills late into the evening. But at the peaks, winter lingers. Glaciers reflect pale light back into the sky. It is not yet one season or the other, but a meeting point, suspended.

This sense of in-between runs through his exhibition, Marks of Seasons. Known for vivid, heightened color - exaggerated yellows, sunsets tipping toward electric pinks and oranges - Tolli shifts here toward something more grounded. Observing colors as they are rather than amplifying them. Earth tones, softened blues and greens, the particular white of snow under a pastel sky. The landscape in a moment of precise seasonal balance. At times the paintings seem to hover, suspended above the atmosphere. At others, the mountains assert their force. We feel small against them, but it is also a steadying force, that smallness. 

His paintings carry a materiality tied to a similar attentiveness. Thick brushstrokes press into the surface, paint gathering in dense, sculptural clumps. Elsewhere, the brush moves in long sweeping gestures, capturing the essence of water and wind. More layered detail accumulates in other passages, where he traces the fractured textures of rock. In other areas, the canvas is left exposed, allowing absence to hold intention and breath. Smaller paintings lean more toward atmospheric abstraction, like fragments of memory. Together, they suggest the simple beauty in experiencing something fully and painting it honestly and candidly. To capture an essence - how the landscape was in that moment, a temperature, a sensation.

The hike unfolded over three days with men Tolli works with through his long-standing engagement with formerly incarcerated people. Walking together through this terrain, the experience became both communal and deeply internal. There is a particular clarity that arrives when walking alone in the mountains. Without distraction, the mind loosens its grip on urgency. Slowness finds you. There is solitude in the vastness, but also connection. Joy arrives in the simplest of moments.

In the Highlands, time rearranges itself. The slow negotiation between winter and summer echoes the quiet transitions within a life, the parts we resist and the parts we grow into. Tolli's connection to Buddhist philosophy shines through here. Each stage carries its own clarity, and aging becomes something to receive and approach with gratitude. Just like the unfolding of a life, these landscapes acknowledge the beauty in the closing of one chapter and the opening of another - the meeting of seasons.

In this exhibition, painting here becomes a way of meeting the world as it is, practicing gratitude and presence at every season of life. The stillness of a June mountainside, the crispness of air, the muted glow of snow against the sky - it already holds more than enough. What more are we searching for?

Tolli Morthens (b. 1953) is an Icelandic artist renowned for his expressive and evolving interpretations of landscapes. After studying at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlinin 1985, he played a key role in introducing Neo-Expressionism to Iceland. His early figurative abstract works, rich in narrative and symbolism, gradually shifted toward landscapes as a central subject, a transformation marked by his 1990 exhibition Sögur af landi at Kjarvalsstaðir, Reykjavík Art Museum. Through his innovative approach, Tolli continues to push the boundaries of landscape painting, capturingIceland’s natural beauty with dynamic and unexpected energy. His works are placed in numerous public and private collections both in Iceland as well as internationally. Recent solo exhibition include A Horizon in Chaos, Þula Gallery, Iceland, 2024 and Rhyolite Hymns,Davis Gallery, Denmark 2025. Recent group exhibitions: Cross Section, Þula Gallery, Iceland, 2025 and Market Art Fair at The Icelandic Embassy, Sweden, 2024. Tolli lives and works in Reykjavík, Iceland.