SIGRID SANDSTRÖM

RECENT PAINTINGS

November 30, 2007 through January 12, 2008

Sigrid Sandström’s new paintings advance from sensitive and sensual depictions of landscape to investigations into the experience and construction of spaces with conceptual clarity.

The development of a painting process that encounters romantic longing, implicit in depictions of icy landscapes unpopulated northern seascapes, flows and glaciers. In the spaces she creates, Sandström wants to encounter the half-known and the mysterious as a concrete invention.  Through these encounters, imaginary space becomes fact. Caves and rooms, paintings within paintings, spaces that define our boundaries and imaginations give form to the romantic impulse, yet the painter imposes her own definitions of physical and emotional experience through disruptive color and geometric invention. Ice caps become exploding shards of abstraction.

Sandström envisions the punctuations of bright color as sound-like, clarion moments in time and space ringing through the air as a sculptural element in a misty world of drifting and dissolving forms, hovering between the representational and the non-representative. Shifting processes of affirmation and erasure, nature and construct, all conspire to create paintings both sensual and cerebral.  

Sigrid Sandström was born in Stockholm, Sweden. She received her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2001. From 2001 to 2003, she was artist-in-residence in the Core program at the Glassell School of Art in Houston. TX. She currently lives in Brooklyn and Tivoli, NY, where she is Assistant Professor of Art at Bard College.

She has had recent solo exhibitions at Galleri Gunnar Olsson, Stockholm, 2007, and in 2006 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, WA.  She was also included in the group exhibition “Pertaining to Painting” at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston and Austin Museum of Art, TX in 2002. This will be her first solo exhibition in New York.

New York

Sigrid Sandström

210 Eleventh Avenue, Sixth Floor

November 30–January 12

John Ruskin’s homage to the “craggy foregrounds and purple distances” of nineteenth-century landscape painting comes to mind on viewing artist Sigrid Sandström’s New York solo debut. Following the romantic impulse to capture the dusky, murky mystery of northern-European scenery, these lovely acrylic paintings employ a palette of grays, whites, and blues (with abrupt, gorgeous flashes of maroon, yellow, red, and orange) and depict fantastical scenes of misty glaciers, foggy mountain peaks, and bleak white ice floes with all the grandeur of a present-day Caspar David Friedrich. But Sandström also grapples here with painting’s essential difficulty in the face of the sublime. As the works consistently teeter on the verge of abstraction, the interplay between a more traditional naturalism and geometric fragmentation provides a salient tension. Stately peaks occupying the upper half of one painting shatter into shards of white and blue, while elsewhere, an avalanche becomes as choppy and angular as scraps of discarded paper. Indeed, the most intriguing paintings in the show are those in which nature’s disintegration becomes indistinguishable from the chaos of the artist’s workspace. When canvases of landscapes make a sudden appearance, as in a mise en abyme, within a work’s larger depiction of mountainous scenery, or when slate-gray earth, littered with rocks and glaciers, merges seamlessly into a painter’s messy studio floor, Sandström’s work boldly suggests that the moment at which landscape is deconstructed is also that in which art is created.

—Naomi Fry