Sigrid Sandström at Anat Ebgi

Artist: Sigrid Sandström

Exhibition title: Other Places

Venue: Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, US

Date: July 30 – August 27, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Other Places, the gallery’s second solo show by the Swedish painter Sigrid Sandström, opening July 30 and on view until August 27.

Sandström’s practice actively interrogates the methods by which viewing initiates and elicits thought and cognition. Her newest body of work consists of a series of portrait-sized paintings hung at equal distance throughout the gallery. As a gestural template, each painting comprises an assortment of brushstrokes impastoed onto intimately-scaled panels colored vividly with swatches of magenta, industrial yellow and concrete grey. With wide gestures applied alongside delicately-painted trompe l’oeil motifs, Sandström situates the dialectic of her practice relationally to the perspective of the viewer.

Sandström’s work engages in the ontology of painting and viewing; how relatively few elements of pigment, stretcher bars and Masonite panels convey complex relationships and sensations far beyond their immediate sensorial qualities. Her idiomatic use of paint explores relationships of experience and materiality, as when a stripe of paint has the likeness of an index card or a strip of tape stuck to the panel’s surface. These motifs both encode and reveal the phenomenological space within her painting where presence and perception supercede material reality. It is in this space that the viewer is connected with their self-awareness as a perceptual agent. They are caught between the awareness of themselves and the transcendent experience of the external object.

Sigrid Sandström (b. 1970) is a painter and Professor of Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Stockholm. Her work has been shown in numerous international institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is part of public and private collections including the Borås Konstmuseum, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. In addition to her work as a painter, she has edited and published several scholarly books and anthologies on painting including Sigrid Sandström: The Site of Painting (Art & Theory: 2016), Studio Talks: Thinking through Painting (Arvinius+Orfeus: 2015) and Grey Hope: The Persistence of Melancholy (Antopia: 2013). Copies of her most recent publication, The Site of Painting, will be available in conjunction with her show at the gallery.