Tróndur Patursson

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Tróndur Patursson in February 2010

Tróndur Sverri Patursson (born March 1, 1944 in Kirkjubøur ) is a Faroese artist who also made a name for himself as an adventurer. Together with the Irishman Tim Severin, he literally sailed all seven seas .

In addition to his abstract paintings and sculptures, his glass paintings are not only considered to be particularly significant in the Faroe Islands, but also in Denmark , where he enjoys high recognition. His main work is the complete interior and stained glass of Gøta Church , on which he worked from 1991 to 1994. Queen Margrethe of Denmark also attended the inauguration .

family

Tróndur [ ˈtɹœndʊɹ ] was born in 1944 as the son of king farmer Jóannes Patursson junior († 1973) and his wife Malan, b. Hansen († 1983) born. His older twin brother Páll was considered the elder heir to the famous Kirkjubøargarður , where his great-grandfather Jóannes Patursson senior was once a royal farmer.

On his 40th birthday in 1984 he married his longtime partner, the designer Borgny Dam Jacobsen (* 1940 in Tórshavn). They live in Kirkjubøur, where they built their own house with a studio and workshop from 1976 to 1979.

Tróndur Patursson's younger brother Bjørn is known as the king's farmer on Koltur , where he and his wife are the only residents.

education

From 1951 to 1958 Tróndur Patursson received daily private lessons on his parents' farm. In the winter of 1958/1959 he was one of the first students at the winter art school of Ingálvur av Reyni and Janus Kamban in Tórshavn . First and foremost, he learned from av Reyni.

From 1959 to 1964 the young Tróndur Patursson was already at sea - the first three years on various freighters, then as a fisherman on trawlers , etc. a. off Greenland and Newfoundland .

His artistic debut was in 1964 at the Ólavsøka exhibition in Tórshavn. In the same year he also took part in the exhibition Færøerne i Fokus (Faroe Islands in focus) in the Nikolaikirche in Copenhagen . There he attended Hans Christian Høyer's drawing school in the winter of 1965/1966 .

After returning to Kirkjubøur in 1966, he had to take care of his parents' farm because his father fell ill while Páll was studying at an agricultural school in Norway . Since Páll had undertaken to continue working in a Norwegian company after completing his training, he asked to swap his twin brother. So Tróndur came to Norway in his place, where he met the sculptor Ståle Kyllingstad , whose collaborator and student he became on the side.

1967-1969 is Tróndur Patursson formed at the Norwegian arts and crafts school in Voss at Bergen as metalsmith from. On the advice of Kyllingstad, for whom he continued to work, he studied from 1969 to 1973 at the State Art Academy in Oslo .

A steel relief in the social welfare office of Tórshavn municipality also dates from 1969 . This was followed in 1972 by a solo exhibition at the Faroe Islands Art Museum and exhibitions in Oslo and Stavanger . After another separate exhibition in the Tórshavner Art Museum in 1973, he went on a study trip to southern France .

In the same year he went on a long journey with comrades from the Oslo Art Academy. They rebuilt an old sailing ship with which they went on a year-long cultural and historical voyage of discovery, which they took from the Faroe Islands to Norway, Scotland , Ireland , the Biscay , northern Spain , Gibraltar , Andalusia , Morocco , Tunisia , Malta , Sicily , Greece , Turkey , Italy , Corsica , Sardinia , Mallorca led back to southern Spain, where they had to leave the ship behind.

On the trip they visited all imaginable exhibitions, collections and monuments.

The adventurer

After an exhibition in Copenhagen in 1976, Tróndur Patursson went on his first adventure trip with Tim Severin : The Brendan Voyage , which was supposed to prove that it was possible to travel across the Faroe Islands and Iceland in a curragh (skin boat), like the legendary St. Brendan of Ireland once did drive to Newfoundland (see Navigatio Sancti Brendani ). They set sail from Brandon Creek on May 16 . The trip to the Faroe Islands went without any problems, but had to be canceled on July 16 in Reykjavík because the weather worsened.

The second stage was postponed to 1977 and lasted from May 7th to June 26th, where they came from Reykjavík to Peckford Island / Newfoundland.

In 1982 he set sail again with Severin. The Sindbad Voyage took them from Oman to China . At the Jason Voyage 1984 he only took part on the leg from Greece to Georgia (April 23 to June 30).

In 1986 he and Severin undertook the Ulysses Voyage to check the truth of the Odyssey .

From May to November 1993 they attempted the China Voyage on a self-made bamboo raft from China to North America , but it was not entirely successful because they started from Japan and had to abandon the raft about 1000 kilometers from the destination.

In 1999, the adventurer duo went on a search for the truth of Moby Dick . This expedition took her to Malaysia , Indonesia and the Philippines, among others . In 2001, following in the footsteps of Robinson Crusoe , we went to the Caribbean .

The artist

Without a doubt, all of these maritime adventures shaped the artist Tróndur Patursson. He became one of the most important cultural workers in the Faroe Islands with several exhibitions every year at home and abroad. In 1981 he and others founded the Association of Faroese Visual Artists (Føroysk Myndlistafólk), which he also chaired from 1990 to 1994. Since 1991 he has been a regular participant in the traditional spring exhibition of the National Art Museum, on whose advisory board he has been since 1995.

Patursson is a decidedly experimental artist who has expressed himself in a number of areas. He works with sculptures and reliefs made of iron , copper and other metals. Driftwood , charred wood, whale bones , stones and other materials from nature are used for monumental sculptures that emphasize materiality, structure and decorative quality.

Bládýpi - “Sea Depth ”
sculpture made of glass and steel (1995) in the Køge Culture House

Tróndur Patursson established himself as a glass artist since 1987. For this he built his own glass furnace. His technique consists in sprinkling colorless powder on the glass plates, which first melts in the oven, sticks and then becomes colored. The random result can only be assessed afterwards. The trick is to still be able to control this coincidence.

When the Scandinavian postal administrations celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Nordic Council in 2002 , the theme was “contemporary art”. Postverk Føroya chose Tróndur Patursson as a worthy representative.

On October 1, 2007, former US President Bill Clinton and former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix visited the Faroe Islands. As an official gift, both received a blue glass bird from Tróndur Patursson's hand.

His work

Interior decoration and stained glass in Gøta Church

Various Faroese and Danish buildings were decorated with his sculptures and glass works of art:

Kosmiska rúmið - "Cosmic space"

“Cosmic Space” adorns the second stamp of the set from 2002.

The first (shown here) version of the “Cosmic Space” called the walk-in space dates from 1996 and was exhibited in Copenhagen on the occasion of the European Capital of Culture . In 2000 there was a separate exhibition for a second version in Randers . The third version from 2002/2003 is outside in front of the Nordatlantens Brygge cultural center in the Danish capital.

The aim of this installation is to put the viewer in the feeling of weightlessness . Tróndur Patursson is trying to express the experience he had when he and Severin crossed the Pacific on a bamboo raft. The journey lasted 106 days. He saw no other ships and was very close to the water on the bamboo raft, which meant that he got into the rhythm of the sea. This experience gave him a kind of cosmic sea feeling, which he expressed in "Cosmic Space":

“ I got it in the container by installing a mirror that you walk on, but then there's a mirror above you that creates a reflection that gives a depth of about 700 meters and a height of about 700 meters. This causes you to get into a kind of cosmic state. When you come into the room there are no longer any horizontal lines or vertical lines; you have the feeling of walking on the water. "

literature

In Danish about the artist

  • Lise Funder, Per Steen Hebsgaard and Gunnar Hoydal : Tróndur Patursson , Copenhagen 1991.
  • Bárður Jákupsson : Færøernes billedkunst . Atlantia, Hjørring 2000 (pp. 100-104)
  • Finn Terman Frederiksen: Tróndur Patursson , Randers Kunstmuseums Forlag, 2003.

In English about the adventurer

  • Tim Severin : The Brendan Voyage . Hutchinson & Co., London 1978 (drawings by Patursson; also in German translation A Thousand Years Before Columbus. In the footsteps of the Irish seafaring monks , Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1979 and Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982 etc.)
  • Tim Severin: The Sindbad Voyage . Hutchinson & Co., London 1982.
  • Tim Severin: The Jason Voyage. The Quest for the Golden Fleece. Hutchingson & Co, London 1985. (Drawings by Patursson)
  • Tim Severin: The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey. Hutchinson & Co, London 1987.
  • Tim Severin: The China Voyage. A Pacific Quest by Bamboo Raft. Little, Brown and Company, London 1994.
  • Tim Severin: In Seach of Moby Dick. Quest for the White Whale. Little, Brown and Company, London 1999. (Drawings by Patursson)
  • Tim Severin: In Search of Robinson Crusoe. Basic Books, New York 2002.

Web links

Commons : Tróndur Patursson  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ portal.fo : Clinton fær glasfugl sum gávu  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.portal.fo   (“Clinton receives a glass bird as a present”) October 1, 2007.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 15, 2005 .
personal data
SURNAME Patursson, Tróndur
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Patursson, Tróndur Sverri
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Faroese artist
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Kirkjubøur , Faroe Islands