Ingálvur av Reyni

Who was Ingálvur av Reyni?

Ingálvur av Reyni was the most celebrated painter of the Faroe Islands during the last years.

Ingálvur av Reyni was born in Tórshavn. He rebelled through his expressionism against the epic content of his predecessors' art, and has opened up new paths in his painting. His art is characterised by a clear, French colourist tone, and his artistic roots go back to Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse.

The powerful nature of the Faroes, which makes an immediate visual impact on any painter, is the all-embracing theme in Reyni's art. But he experiences nature from the inside, as structures, tones, and fragments of a universe offering opportunities for graphical treatment of form and movement, light colours and rhythms. The expressions of nature become the basis of an increasingly abstract idiom.

The light fills his landscapes, interiors and figure paintings from the 1940s and 1950s, where he characteristically simplifies the motif in cubist style. The lines and forms of nature contribute to the strict, cubist-inspired composition of the picture, or they are subjected to it. The composition is free of all unnecessary elements, and the work becomes at the same time a picture of both the inner and the outer reality. Increasingly contrasting colours are set against each other, until the culmination at the end of the 1950s with the bold counterplay of complementary colours.