From the catalogue for the exhibition Painting (“Málverk”) in 2000 at Hafnarborg.

By Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir
There is a certain mood of heaven in Margrét Sveinsdóttir’s work, as if she has captured the clouds and contained them on the canvas, packed them in little pillowcases and knotted them together on the corners, so that they make up long rows. These pillowcases are the conclusion — or the origin?  — of a game with forms, where the sides of the square are softly bent inside, as if put into parenthesis and then aligned together into the infinite so it forms squares and circles. The borders between these different forms disintegrate and bleed into each other. The square bends into a circle and the circle is tamed into a square and both forms disintegrate and brake out of the endless happy series of new forms, new patterns, like it happens on one of the canvases, where it is as if the paint takes on a liquid form again, digs itself down into vortexes and ripples in the wind of excitement.
In the same manner as the formality of forms is made dubious, the painting itself is gambled with as a form. The works of Margrét are painting, in the sense that the focus is not on an image or a picture, but rather is the canvas and the paint itself the foundation of the artwork, thick rafts — or pillows — of paint that push themselves into the canvas as if it is pushing against the notion that the artwork is the result of a spiritual practice, art in its loftiness and elevation of understanding, where the flimsy image is like a liquid reflection or fleeting copy. By smearing thick, layer upon layer of oil paint, on the canvas, there is a certain sense of materialism in the painting that reminds one that a painting is no less an object and material than a picture of a replica. Margrét’s artwork has broken out of the surface of the painting, blown itself off the canvas and taken on a substantial form.
Under the disciplinary surface, the chaos churns and threatens to rip apart the tight net, the web or the weaving. It is almost as if behind the disciplinary surface lives a creature of adventure, a manifestation of chaos, the flip side of Mother Goose, that grasps with both her hands the pattern and shakes it, maybe to open a path out?
At the center of the calm of the coated surface there is a sign of disruption, the knots have loosened up in the middle of the maranges raft and the little pillows that are full of clouds are drifting to the sky.