SIGRID SANDSTRÖM

Please join us for a walk-through led by artist Sigrid Sandström and art historian Suzanne Hudson, Friday, July 7 at 5pm.

For over two decades, Sandström has concerned herself with the surface of the canvas, exploring one of the oldest motifs in painting: the landscape. Though abstract, her works are reminiscent of landslides, melting glaciers, and celestial phenomena. Stripping painting back to its basic element: paint applied to surface, Sandström explores endless techniques and variations—staining, pooling, brushing, smearing, seeping, and an inventive printing gesture where Sandström coats crumpled material with paint and presses it to the canvas, leaving behind a contact print.

The exhibition title makes allusion to Janus of Roman mythology. The god of doors, gateways, and transitions, the two faces of Janus attend to every angle, to past and future, to entrance and egress, to comings and goings. Alongside wall works, the exhibition features a trio of paintings shown hanging freely from the gallery ceiling. These suspended works are intended to be experienced from both sides. Despite wildly different temperaments, the recto and verso of the canvas are given equal status.

As if in constant motion, Sandström’s compositions tumble and whir. There is a sense of something happening on these canvases, while simultaneously revealing how they came to be. Each shape-gesture is distinct in tone and attitude. What at first appear to be form-based experiments, in the next moment transform into illusions of dizzying depth. Sandström offers us the chance to look, to look again. Sandström’s inquiries take place on a stage of raw canvas transporting us somewhere bottomless, edgeless, boundaryless. From this visual blankness, emerges a rhythm and structure of color and shape waiting to be absorbed by the past and projected into the future.

Sigrid Sandström (b. 1970) is a painter and Professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts / Uniarts Helsinki. She studied at Cooper Union School of Art, New York, NY (1995); earned a BFA at Academie Minerva, Groningen, The Netherlands (1997); attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (2000); and received an MFA in Painting from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2001). Residencies, grants and fellowships include Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House,Ménerbes, France (2018), The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts residency scholarship at Grez-sur-Loing, France (2014), The 2008 Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, New York (2008). Sandström was a recipient of a Core fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2001-2003).

Sandström’s work is in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden; Malmö konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden; The Public art Agency, Sweden; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; Västerås konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Sandström lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.