Within the 12 months 2000, whereas she was getting her MFA at Yale, the Swedish artist Sigrid Sandström ran away to Maine for a summer time residency on the Skowhegan College of Portray and Sculpture. It was a turning level. “That’s once I began portray landscapes, as a result of it’s principally an identical to the Swedish land,” Sandström says. “The lilacs have been just a little greater, they bloomed later. Their foxes had completely different noses. However I acknowledged each tree sort—it was nearly like a distorted reminiscence.”
Since then, Sandström, 55, has made the compelling case {that a} panorama is not only a area or a mountain or a pond; it’s a psychological house as a lot as a bodily one. Her scenes might be muted and desolate, like a pasture caught between winter and spring, or they’ll dazzle just like the setting solar, and churn like the ocean after a storm. In a single current portray, the five-feet-tall Nubes, a cloud-like puff is surrounded by swirls of blue and pale yellow—each playful and ominous. “I’m fascinated by issues which can be in some way emotive, unclear, unresolved,” she says.
Sandström’s dwelling base is Stockholm, the place she lives together with her husband, an structure professor at Lund College, and their 15-year-old daughter. However once we converse this previous summer time, she’s about two hours west, in her studio at their nation home close to the small metropolis of Örebro. She’s had a busy few years. Within the final two alone she’s exhibited in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and she or he has simply confirmed a present with Perrotin gallery in London for subsequent March. However her focus proper now’s this fall, when her newest suite of enormous summary work will go on view in New York Metropolis at Anat Ebgi gallery. It will likely be her first solo exhibition within the metropolis in over a decade.
Sandström favors the quick-drying tempo of acrylic paint over oils, and she or he has lengthy used methods like staining, smearing, splattering, and printing to layer in texture. Colour-wise, the brand new works are bolder, fiercer. She took inspiration from the early Renaissance, particularly the frescoes of Giotto and Fra Angelico. “I’ve been enthusiastic about the robes endlessly, to combine pink and orange and this purple,” Sandström says.
