Sigrid Sandström

Sigrid Sandström is a Swedish artist and a professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her work is characterized by graphic abstraction, an embrace of color and difference in scale, and an array of techniques used to apply paint and other materials to canvas, ranging from cloths and rugs, to masking with tape, squeegee-ing and smearing, and collaging. She has also worked in film and video, most notably for her 2005 exhibition Her Black Flags at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, CA, and in sculpture and installation. Artforum critic Naomi Fry, reviewing a 2007 show at Edward Thorp Gallery, cited the artist's interest in landscape as subject and noted that Sandström "also grapples here with painting’s essential difficulty in the face of the sublime. As the works consistently teeter on the verge of abstraction, the interplay between a more traditional naturalism and geometric fragmentation provides a salient tension."