In the year 2000, while she was getting her MFA at Yale, the Swedish artist Sigrid Sandström ran away to Maine for a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. It was a turning point. “That’s when I started painting landscapes, because it’s basically identical to the Swedish land,” Sandström says. “The lilacs were a little bigger, they bloomed later. Their foxes had different noses. But I recognized every tree type—it was almost like a distorted memory.”
Since then, Sandström, 55, has made the compelling case that a landscape is not just a field or a mountain or a pond; it’s a psychological space as much as a physical one. Her scenes can be muted and desolate, like a pasture stuck between winter and spring, or they can dazzle like the setting sun, and churn like the sea after a storm. In one recent painting, the five feet tall Nubes, a cloud-like puff is surrounded by swirls of blue and pale yellow—both playful and ominous. “I’m interested in things that are somehow emotive, unclear, unresolved,” she says.
Sandström’s home base is Stockholm, where she lives with her husband, an architecture professor at Lund University, and their 15-year-old daughter. But when we speak this past summer, she’s about two hours west, in her studio at their country house near the small city of Örebro. She’s had a busy few years. In the last two alone she’s exhibited in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and she has just confirmed a show with Perrotin gallery in London for next March. But her focus right now is this fall, when her latest suite of large abstract paintings will go on view in New York City at Anat Ebgi gallery. It will be her first solo exhibition in the city in over a decade.
Sandström favors the quick-drying tempo of acrylic paint over oils, and she has long used techniques like staining, smearing, splattering, and printing to layer in texture. Color-wise, the new works are bolder, fiercer. She took inspiration from the early Renaissance, especially the frescoes of Giotto and Fra Angelico. “I’ve been thinking about the robes forever, to mix pink and orange and this purple,” Sandström says.
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