Her palette was not a phase

Tryggvadóttir painted in color, and not incidentally. Working from the 1940s through the 1960s, she moved through figuration toward abstraction, and the shift never cost her the palette. Her mature compositions run on planes of red, blue, yellow and green set against darker grounds. The color does the structural work. Remove it and much of the composition collapses into shape alone.

That matters if you are hoping for a monochrome piece. Some artists produced genuine black-and-white work, in drawings, prints or a deliberate period. Tryggvadóttir is not really one of them. Her drawings and studies exist, but the work she is known for, and the work that circulates as editions, is chromatic. A grayscale version is a translation, not a recovery of something she left behind.

What a monochrome print actually is

A grayscale edition of a color painting is a conversion. The printer maps each hue to a tone of gray, and the result depends on how far apart those hues were in value. A red and a green of similar brightness can end up nearly identical in gray, flattening the composition. With Tryggvadóttir this is a real risk, because her color blocks often sit close in tone and rely on hue contrast to stay separate.

That said, a well-made conversion can work. Where her compositions have strong value structure, dark grounds under light planes, the gray version holds its architecture and reads as graphic rather than washed out. If you are weighing formats for a room where color feels like too much, it is worth reading how to choose between a canvas print and a framed poster choose between canvas and framed poster before deciding whether grayscale suits the piece.

List": {"title": "Before choosing grayscale", "style": "bullet", "items": ["Check whether the original composition has strong light-dark contrast, not just strong color", "Expect hue relationships to disappear, since similar tones merge into one gray", "Consider a single accent piece instead, keeping color but reducing saturation", "Match the print to the wall, since gray on a pale wall can read as unfinished"]}

If you want restraint without erasing color

There is a middle path worth naming. A room that feels overpowered by strong color does not always need monochrome art. It sometimes needs less of it, or a quieter frame, or a single large piece instead of a cluster. Tryggvadóttir's compositions carry enough structure to hold a wall on their own, which changes the calculus. One print, well sized, often reads calmer than three small ones.

Size and placement do more for visual quiet than stripping the color out. A large canvas low on a wide wall anchors a room in a way a small framed piece cannot, and the practicalities are covered in what size print fits a small living room sizing a print for your room. If the goal is a cooler, more neutral scheme overall, the surrounding palette matters as much as the art, which is the subject of which colors complement her work in a bedroom colors that pair with her work.