On September 29, Guðjón Bjarnason’s exhibition abstrACT colOR disBElieve, comprising abstract prints and site-specific installations, opened at The Tenri Cultural Institute of New York.

In the September 2008 issue of Sculpture Magazine, critic Jonathan Goodman reviews a recent exihibition of Guðjón's, concluding that "His sense of a reality mediated by violence is about as up to date as a work can get. ... The combinantion of control and loss of control, so central to Bjarnason's aesthetic, creates works whose jagged contours remain in our memory long after we have left the exhibition."

For the Tenri show, Bjarnason incorporates his interest in space, light, and line that work in tandem to produce sensitive assays into dimensionality. His works on canvas or on paper synthesize drawing, printing and painting into the same work. For the Tenri installation Bjarnason experiments with his means; drawing, painting, erasing, re-drawing, folding, multiplying, reducing, shredding, and gluing his materials to produce works that in their monumentality meld with the viewer to become one. The pieces hang to the floor extending out into viewer space, spreading and shrinking to the touch. These free-flowing entities cannot be ignored as they impose themselves on the audience in their vertical and horizontal orientations. In this respect Bjarnason uses chance and accident while simultaneously and carefully orchestrating the result. While his metal sculptures are minimalist and full of right angles, his drawings and paintings betray his preference for soft, organic, biomorphic shapes that meander, travel, wander and reunite as loose dynamic forms. Bjarnason who uses dynamite to work with metals in his sculptural installations shows a healthy respect for nature which is supreme in the Northern European hemisphere from where he comes. By detonating metals allowing their shapes to arise from the very explosion to which he subjected them, he deploys allows natural occurrence to manifest while to an extent controlling the outcome.