IslANDs - Compressed Realities - Exploded Photoworks

Profile
Gudjon Bjarnason
Gudjon Bjarnason (b. 1959), the founder and creative director
of GB-AAA (Gudjon Bjarnason Art & Architecture Ateliers) is a
sculptor, visual artist, architect and urban planner who lives and
works out of Reykjavik, New York and Pondicherry in South-
India.
He has been an internationally practicing architect and multimedia
artist over two decades and has had over fourty art
and design exhibitions, often of his conceptual sculptural/
architectural installations whereas he has often utilized explosives
for systematic deformations of metals commonly originating
from the building industry.
The pyrotechnical installations have frequently been exhibited
along with his stark, graphically complex, black/white/gray-scale
multi-layered, semi-transparent, semi-automatic paintings/
prints, slow motions videos and in situ negative photography
often along with architectural models and art books in museums,
biennales and galleries across the United States, Asia and Europe
including the Nordic countries.
After graduating from The Reykjavik Junior Collage (MR) Gudjon
studied preliminary law and philosophy at the University of
Iceland. Hencefort, after fast phased global travels of cultural
studies, he headed for USA and enrolled in architecture, design
and painting at The Rhode Island School of Design, Providence,
(BFA and B.Arch honors), painting and sculpture at The School of
Visual Arts, New York (MFA in Painting and Sculpture) and, finally,
architectural design and city planning at Columbia University,
New York (M.ARCH II in Urban Planning and Building Design)
where he graduated in 1990 with excellency.
He has taught art and architecture at the Rhode Island School of
Design, the USA Institute at the New Jersey Institute of Technology
and the Technical University of Verona, Pratt University, Brooklyn,
Parsons School of Design, New York as well as the Icelandic
School of Architecture (ISARK) where he was one of its founders,
a teacher and first managing director.
In October 2011, Gudjon established GB-AAA; progressive art
and architectural ateliers under his own name, operating out
of Pondicherry, Reykjavik and New York which are presently
engaged in the design of numerous highly creative large scale
modern buildings as well as cultural projects/exhibits in various
cities in India as well as in China, Europe and the USA.
As a leading architects his atelier GB-AAA, were recently selected
first place winners in several Indian architectural competitions of
national and international importance e.g.: SICPAC - The Shillong
International Center for Performance Art and Culture, size
23,500 sq. m., which contains four major auditoriums halls, the
National Tribal Museum for the Arts, the Shillong Contemporary
Art Center as well as an outdoor amphitheater seating 20,000
spectators.
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