Karl Kvaran

Who was Karl Kvaran?

Karl Kvaran was an Icelandic painter and draughtsman. He was born in Borðeyri in western Iceland and died in Reykjavík. He is considered one of the principal exponents of the geometric abstractionist school of painting in Iceland in the early sixties.

Kvaran studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen. He also studied under Peter Rostrup Bøyesen.

Kvaran was influenced by the abstract art of Svavar Guðnason and Þorvaldur Skúlason, an innovative development of the 1940s. Iceland experienced a period of prosperity in the post-war era and for the first time painters and writers began to form groups and movements. Kvaran and Kristján Davíðsson were important figures in the development of the geometric abstractionist school.

In the early part of his career he worked in a French-influenced post-Cubist style. The sculpted, "hammered" surface texture of his strongly composed paintings was created using regular, abrupt brush strokes.

At the beginning of the 1950s Kvaran abandoned figurative art for geometrical abstraction, using pure, uniform colour to create two-dimensional geometric forms.