Reykjavík Grapevine - 04.04.2014, Side 26

One Man’s Cave
Inside Grotta Zine, art lives in
Frosti Gnarr’s world
26The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 4 — 2014
Frosti runs the zine with resources from
Frosti Gnarr Studio, his design/creative
studio, and calls it “a side project of
my side projects.” Fifty print editions
of each issue of Grotta are sold at six
locations around 101 Reykjavik and the
online version, which exists mostly on
Tumblr, has more than 100,000 follow-
ers. Though the website features an oft
changing mix of artists, each print edi-
tion features the selected work of just
one Icelandic artist.
“I’m in essence a collector myself,”
he says, “and I started it [Grotta] be-
cause I wanted to collect this art and
have a zine where I could expose the
stuff I like.”
The first issue of Grotta came out
in June 2012 with the help of Frosti’s
friend and financial/logistics guy at
Frosti Gnarr Studio, Giuseppe Russo.
The featured artist was Sigurður An-
gantýsson, whose drawings came
under Frosti’s radar during another of
his side projects—teaching a portfolio
review course at the Iceland Academy
of the Arts. Sigurður’s review came up
right around the time Frosti was build-
ing up Grotta.
“I said to Sigurður, your design is
fine and it works, but your art, your
drawings, they are amazing, you have
to do something with them,” Frosti says.
Hell Cat
Grotta was created as the successor to
‘Frosti Magazine,’ a publication Frosti
started while he was working toward
a Masters in editorial design at the
Utrecht School of the Arts in the Neth-
erlands. The title of that magazine “says
a lot about how I like to work,” he says.
Like Grotta, it was all his aesthetic and
ethos. Grotta Zine is, in every fibre of
the print version and pixel of the web-
site, Frosti’s aesthetic. The artists se-
lected, the narrative flow of the zine, the
organisation and display of the work,
are all by his hand.
When Frosti returned to Iceland,
with the intent to continue publishing
the type of art compilation he would
want for his own shelves, he felt a full
magazine was going to be too much.
He decided, rather, to make it a zine and
traded the eponymous title for Grotta.
Frosti has since published seven
print issues, the most recent of which
came out at the end of December. The
idea is to keep showcasing Icelandic
artists who have yet to be granted great
exposure, a mixture of friends in the
thick artists’ community of Reykjavík
and unknowns who he’s had to track
down. When he discovered the photog-
raphy of a man called ‘Hell Cat’ he set
to work finding out the guy’s real name
and where he could be found.
‘Hell Cat’ was also a pointed mo-
ment of divergent taste between Frosti
and friends who weigh in on the maga-
zine. “There were some people that
were kind of apprehensive about the
Hell Cat one because it’s a lot of nudity
and drunk photography that’s kind of
based upon the worst parts of Reyk-
javík,” he says. “It’s kind of this border
between where is it art and where is it
just nightlife photography with disgust-
ing subjects and, with the curation of it,
I wanted to show this point. It kind of
all came together and it kind of made
sense as art.”
Muck Pizza
Each issue takes about a month to
produce and the best part of the pro-
cess is culling through photos, paint-
ings, drawings, sculptures, whatever
the artist brings to him. With Hell Cat,
it was sorting through hundreds of
photos. In the June 2013 feature that
showcased new and old drawings by
the hardcore-music/art/weird collec-
tive Muck, Frosti took a more active
role. The group stayed at Frosti’s studio
for a weekend and played music, drew
and took turns sandwiching their faces
onto a Xerox machine.
“We spent a lot of time going
through their stuff, like, old pizza boxes
they had been drawing on,” he says.
The Muck drawings on pizza boxes are
like Brueghel sketches with an Oedi-
pus complex: creature-like depictions
of humans with sharp teeth, sagging
faces and mostly preoccupied with one
or more penises. As a feature in Grotta,
the old pizza boxes saw the light of day
as art. It works; it’s actually really great
and hopefully Muck keeps eating pizza.
Curator Of Your Own Mind
An entire zine about your own percep-
tion of art could come off as ostenta-
tious but Frosti pulls it off for two rea-
sons: one, his aesthetic is interesting
and original and the execution of the
zine is well done. It’s not a coffee table
ornament your eyes skate over; it’s a
real record of real artists doing uncon-
ventional work. The second is, he’s not
an ostentatious person, which is prob-
ably why he doesn’t lack artists that
want to work with him in order to be
featured in Grotta. As self-aggrandizing
as naming a magazine after yourself
might seem (Oprah), Grotta Zine to-
day is intended to promote the artists
themselves. “There was a void in arts
representation, and there was a void in
the representation of the art that I like.
This is about exposing it.”
Perhaps over ambitiously, the zine
started as a bi-weekly joint, but has
now jumped the rails of stringent pub-
lication dates. Between print releases,
the website is updated and added to
monthly. Frosti says there is interest in
Germany and the US in starting Grotta-
like magazines featuring obscure, local
artists from different cities, meaning
the curation of art as it exists in his head
could expand to bigger, distant caves.
Creating things in the likeness of
ourselves is usually with the hope that
others will have a clearer understand-
ing of who we are or how we think we
are. When you’re talking with Frosti
about Grotta Zine, you’re also talking
with him about himself. “People con-
nect with it, or they don’t, and both are
great,” he says. “It [Grotta] gets you, if
you get it.”
Words by
Alex Baumhardt
Everyone should have a place to exist outside of his or her own mind, which is probably
why some people have kids, some write books, some make music and 28-year-old Frosti
Gnarr created Grotta (“Cave”) Zine. He publishes the 30-something-page zine under the
guise of ‘A forum for Icelandic artists,’ but each issue is sent out into the world as, first
and foremost, the tangible manifestation of what goes on in his head when he sees art.
Art
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“There was a void in
arts representation,
and there was a void in
the representation of
the art that I like. This
is about exposing that
Icelandic art.”