Zekarias Musele Thompson

Lives and works in Oakland, CA and Reykjavík, IS

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Exhibitions & Projects

2026
2025
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    I Paint the Mountain with Myself

    solo exhibition at Associate Gallery, Reykjavík, Iceland
    August 16th to September 14th, 2025
    oil on linen, cotton thread, visual and sonic duets

    curated by Ástríður Jónsdottir
    installation view of quilt #1 (the mountain)

    I Paint the Mountain with Myself worked through impressions of Iceland, a place evocative in the cultural imaginary and reached through intimate relations that leave their traces before arrival. The exhibition centered on quilt #1 (the mountain), a single room-filling painting made of oil on linen panels pressed wet against each other and sewn together as a quilt around the four walls of the gallery. The viewer entered the work rather than encountering it from outside; the stitching, turned inward, became the visible surface. The painted images, ranging from satellite views of the east coast and Vatnajökull to ground-level landscape and small hand-drawn mountain ranges sewn into larger oceans, were made in California while thinking through encounters with Eggert Pétursson's paintings in process, a sun-bleached curtain of a shed in Hrísey, Margrét H. Blöndal's oil spreading across paper, Georg Guðni's disappearing landscapes, and Kjarval's Fjallamjólk. Blöndal's mark-making was the nearest stylistic kinship to my approach in the paintings. All the paintings of the exhibition first existed as quilt #1; after the exhibition the quilt was unstitched, each painting continuing as an autonomous work, including Air! Air Everywhere, Portrait of the Artist as the Eye of a Deep Hole, and Land Marks....

    The satellite image of the east adapted a method from Pétursson, who sometimes uses the satellite view of an area he has visited as the underlying compositional structure for paintings of close-up flora. For parts of quilt #1, I painted first and laid the satellite image on top, a reversal that turns the structural ground into the surface.

    Four duets activated the exhibition across its run, each with an artist whose proximity to the place and the people that inspired the work made the encounter possible. Eggert Pétursson contributed a visual intervention on view from the opening day and joined the first duet on September 7 in conversation about painting, and his intervention. The closing on September 14th presented three further duets: a sonic performance duet with Pétur Eggertsson, Eggert's son; a sonic performance duet with petals; and a walking duet with Hrafnkell Tumi Georgsson, Georg Guðni's son, along the King's Road, where we made drawings and recordings of our time at specific intervals. 
    photographs by Sisters Lumiére

    installation view of AIR! Air Everywhere






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