Thordis Adalsteinsdottir: Rules of the Game

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition of paintings by Thordis Adalsteinsdottir, the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together works produced between 2022 and 2026, the exhibition offers a survey of Adalsteinsdottir’s recent paintings while introducing a new series that draws from stories in the Old Testament. The exhibition will be on view from April 4, 2026 through May 23, 2026 with an opening reception on Saturday April 4th from 4 to 6pm.

Adalsteinsdottir’s paintings often begin with scenes that feel familiar: a room, a figure resting, animals moving quietly through domestic space. Yet the logic of these environments quickly shifts. Humans and animals coexist without clear hierarchy, scale slips unexpectedly, and the narrative seems to unfold according to a private internal rhythm rather than the rules of realism.

The result is a world that feels both intimate and subtly estranged—like a story remembered incorrectly or a dream that refuses to resolve.

Animals in Adalsteinsdottir’s paintings carry a quiet authority. They appear neither symbolic nor subordinate, instead sharing the scene with humans on equal terms. This collapse of hierarchy echoes the strange moral landscape of fables and biblical stories alike, where animals often reveal truths about human behavior that the humans themselves fail to recognize.

Several new paintings draw loosely from stories in the Old Testament, which Adalsteinsdottir approaches less as sacred history than as a set of narratives repeatedly used to explain or justify human behavior. In a painting of Noah inspired by Genesis 9.20, the patriarch appears collapsed and drunk on the floor, a cup slipping from his hand while a child wearing a helmet fitted with a camera watches the scene unfold. Animals gather nearby, observing with quiet composure. The painting reduces a foundational biblical figure to a fragile human episode, collapsing myth into something strangely ordinary.

Works such as Noah Painting and A Lion, a Bear and a Lamb, Isaiah 11:6 weave these references into the artist’s ongoing exploration of unstable narrative space. Rather than illustrating biblical events, the paintings allow fragments of these stories to surface within interiors where myth, memory, and everyday life quietly overlap.

Across the exhibition, myth, domestic life, and quiet absurdity occupy the same visual space. Animals move through these environments with calm authority while human figures appear distracted, awkward, or uncertain of their role. What begins as a familiar scene slowly shifts, revealing a world where the structures meant to organize meaning—story, hierarchy, even human control—feel unexpectedly fragile.

Thordis Adalsteinsdottir received an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY after graduating from the Icelandic Academy of Arts and the Universidad de Barcelona, in Spain. Adalsteinsdottir has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally with exhibitions at The Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavik Iceland, The National Gallery of Iceland, Myokos Biennale, Greece, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Luis, MO, Chiang Mai Art Center, Thailand, and Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. In 2025 she received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.