Painting Through Trials and Pain

Anja Stella Ólafsdóttir’s exhibition, Nine Dreams Beyond Reality, brings together nine oil paintings at Tina Jezorski’s goldsmith shop at Laugavegur 48. The exhibition runs until September 22.

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I mainly paint to make myself feel better.

“I mainly paint to make myself feel better,” Ólafsdóttir says. She has used art to work through emotions, trials and suffering.

Ólafsdóttir stopped painting for several years after suffering a nervous breakdown in Denmark, where she had lived for 13 years. She subsequently moved back to Iceland, where she has now lived for five years.

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I have used art to work through emotions, trials and suffering.

She picked up her brushes again last year. At first, she mainly painted portraits, but later moved toward fantasy images and fairy worlds. In those imagined spaces, she says, she can shift away from reality and enter dream worlds where anything is possible.

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That way I can shift gears from reality and fall into dream worlds where anything is possible.