Sigrid Sandström. Other Places

About

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.