Sigrid Sandström

Sigrid Sandström is a Swedish artist and professor of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. She has previously, also, held teaching positions at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; Bard College, NY, U.S.A. and MassArt, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. Her work is characterized by graphic abstraction, an embrace of colour and difference in scale; as well as an array of techniques used to apply paint and other materials to canvas, ranging from cloths and rugs, to masking with tape, squeegee-ing, 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, California, U.S.A.) as well as 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.’

Sandström, who was born in Stockholm, received a bachelor’s degree in fine art from Academie Minerva, Groningen in the Netherlands (1997), prior to which she spent a year studying, on an exchange program, at The Cooper Union School of Art in New York City, U.S.A. (1995). Sandström later attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine, U.S.A. (2001), returning as faculty in 2014, and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. (2001). Sandström has also attended the Core Residency Program at Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, U.S.A. (2001-03).

Sandström’s work has been shown at a number of museums internationally, including the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, California, U.S.A. and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston & the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, U.S.A. In 2006, she had a one-person exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. and in 2018 Sandström had a one-person exhibition at Västerås Art Museum, Västerås, Sweden. In 2019 she had a survey one-person exhibition at Konstens hus in Luleå, Sweden. She also has exhibited works with Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.; Inman Gallery, Houston, Texas, U.S.A.; Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, U.S.A.; Galleri Gunnar Olsson and Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm; Perrotin, Tokyo; Perrotin, Shanghai, China; Vandalorum, Värnamo, Sweden; Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm and Reykjavik Art Museum. Sandström’s work is included in the collections of the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Public Art Agency Sweden; Malmö Art Museum, Malmö, Sweden; Borås Art Museum, Borås, Sweden and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, U.S.A. to name a few.

Sandström’s first solo show in Los Angeles, Other Places, was hosted in 2016 by Anat Ebgi Gallery. Her second show with the gallery, Figure Ground, took place in 2021, and was covered by the publication Artland. Sandström’s third solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Janus, took place in the summer of 2023.

Residencies, grants and fellowships include the Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France; The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts residency scholarship at Grez-sur-Loing, France; The 2008 Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

Sandström is the editor of the publication Material Matters: Painting and Its Materialities, 2020, Art & Theory & the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. She is the co-editor, with Gavin Morrison, of Ignorance: Between Knowing and Not Knowing (2015), an anthology which aims to differentiate ignorance from ‘not knowing’ and to determine the philosophical role of ignorance in the development and reception of artworks. Along with artists Kristina Bength and Jan Rydén as well ascurator Jonatan Habib Engqvist, she produced Studio Talks: Thinking Through Painting (2014), a book documenting discussions and studio visits linking the practice of painting with the theoretical framework that undergirds it. She also published Grey Hope: The Persistence of Melancholy (2006), which was awarded a grant from the Barbro Osher Foundation. In 2016 the monograph The Site of Painting was published on Sandström’s work.

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