Perrotin Shanghai is pleased to announce Afterimages, the Swedish artist Sigrid Sandström’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Amongst her translucent layers of positive and negative space, Sigrid Sandström has conjured a series of peaks within the gallery white cube.
“Afterimages,” a culmination of Sandström’s study on glacial landforms and canvas space since 2000, initially suggests an anti-space quality. The flat shapes and layered compositions seem to indicate an impenetrable surface. However, through techniques reminiscent of traditional Chinese landscape painting — permeation, leakage, and wrinkling — each brushstroke glimmers like jade in the light, transforming otherwise dull stone walls into crisp veils. Layer by layer, abstract terrains, and water flows unfold into profound depths. This visual effect, both delicate and expansive, results from Sandström’s masterful balance of flatness and spatiality, deftly achieved through the modulation of distance.
Claude-Étienne Savary once remarked that to truly behold the majesty of a pyramid, one must neither approach too closely nor retreat too far. Building upon this notion, Immanuel Kant contended that proximity may hamper comprehension, while excessive distance impairs apprehension. He thus posited an optimal distance, a perfect balance between these faculties. As American scholar John Sallis noted, most landscape paintings struggle to meet this ideal distance. Indeed, capturing landscapes in verisimilitude often eludes this delicate balance. However, this challenge can be surmounted in more abstract renderings. Through refined modulations of both physical and psychological perspectives, Sandström's work appears to have discovered a “correct distance” that reconciles such complexities.
The painter should not paint merely what he sees before him but also what he sees within him. If he sees nothing within himself, then he should refrain from painting what he sees before him.
In composition, the artist adopts techniques akin to that of traditional Chinese landscape painting, achieving a remarkable harmony between object and space. The composition is defined by spontaneous, concise blocks of color, while the finer details resemble delicate dyeing techniques. The edges of various hues merge and mingle, creating a misty, ethereal effect. Once the paint is applied, it is left to flow with the canvas’s resting position, giving rise to a secondary layer of artistry shaped by the forces of time and gravity. Dyeing and appropriating the canvas, Sandström emulates the subtle, improvisational rhythms of wood, stone, clouds, and water. This cross-media approach produces textural strokes, where originally flat color blocks acquire spatial folds, transforming the depicted objects into both mountains and rocks.
An uncharted realm to explorers, “Glacier” imparts a chilling and distant quality to Sandström’s works. Her landscapes, unlike the tranquil and serene unity of man and nature in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, evoke a wilderness free of human centrality. These scenes are primordial, sublime, and detached. Sandström makes no attempt to domesticate the mountains and rivers; instead, she faithfully captures their inherent peril and majesty. Rather than direct depiction, human presence emerges through the nuanced connection between the viewer and the landscape: humans, being part of nature, navigate the dual roles of explorer and the explored. The presence of man reveals itself and fluctuates in the viewer’s struggle between self-affirmation and the uncertainty of the external world, laying bare the insignificance of humanity in the midst of the landscape.
“Afterimage” carries the latent currents found in Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s Hot Spring Cone, Provo Valley, Utah (1869) and Fissure Vent at Steamboat Springs, Nevada (1867) — a vast, immovable world fraught with daunting unknowns and moments on the brink of collapse. Yet, it is precisely nature’s unclaimed existence that allows it to mirror human sentiment within its steadfast reality. Sandström captures this paradoxical allure, projecting irrational emotions, desires, and longings onto these landscapes. These feelings, akin to the afterglow upon the snow, warmed and expanded by human presence, become a new light that illuminates the world. Its origin and contours, however, remain perpetually elusive. This light in turn transmutes into an eternal sense of lack, a ceaseless pursuit.
Listening to it, we become ocean.
Born in 1970
Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden
At the heart of Sigrid Sandström’s work lies the inquiry into the ethos of painting as an image, particularly through her exploration of abstract landscapes. Drawing inspiration from disciplines spanning geography, sociology, and philosophy, she meticulously articulates sensations and reveries. Elemental features such as circular disc shapes, poured paint, and stains serve as shapeshifting strategies, allowing associations to shift from pure painterly abstraction to more precise pictorial imagery, such as mountains, water, earth, sunlight, and shades. This transient viewing experience aims to further examine the notions of “where,” “when,” and “how” a painting develops into a visual encounter and perceived site.
Sandström’s compositions traverse the dual realms of site — both as a conceptual framework and an experiential construct, establishing a dynamic interplay among artist, artwork, and viewer. Progressing towards heightened abstraction, her expansive depictions of desolate landscapes persistently challenge the ontological parameters of painting as a medium. This inherent ambiguity assumes a pivotal role in both the genesis of her art and its interaction with the audience.
More about the artist
