Sigrid Sandström – De blå timmarna

We are excited to present Sigrid Sandström’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, De blå timmarna (The Blue Hours), featuring a new series of paintings in acrylics and oil stick.

L’heure bleue refers to the twilight period before sunrise or after sunset. Since the Impressionists, this time of day has been valued by artists for the quality of its soft light. In the painting Impression, sunlight (1874) by Claude Monet, claimed to inspire the name of the Impressionist movement, transitional light is key. For late 19^th century Scandinavian painters like Eugène Jansson, Karl Nordström and Peder Severin Krøyer, the use of blue hues allowed them to capture the awakening or disappearance of the day.

In Sandström’s show, the title may imply that the ambiguous stretch of dusk goes on for hours during the Nordic winter season. This sensation has indeed been reinforced in the gallery where the windowpanes have been covered by different shades of blue, continuously altering the play of light in the room and leaving the paintings in a state of flux.

Over recent years, Sandström’s paintings have evolved into more organic and softer shapes, where the absorbing quality of the canvas allows brush strokes, imprints and remnants to seep through the fabric. In De blå timmarna, largescale paintings, where stark colour patches meet thin layers of paint, are put in contrast to smaller and distinctively figurative paintings in oil stick. On one of the walls, a painting in 8 parts inspired by Japanese landscape painting, invites the viewer to walk alongside the work. 

The concept of blue has several connotations: calmness, distance, sadness, and melancholy. In a time of ongoing wars and where turmoil is getting closer, Sigrid Sandström’s exhibition bears the emotional marks of pressing political and environmental issues. De blå timmarna offers a transition from vigilance to rest, from the pressing issues of reality to reflection and serenity.

Sigrid Sandström (b. 1970) received her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, New Haven, CT in 2001. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, in 2000. She studied at Cooper Union School of Art in New York in 1995, and subsequently earned her BFA at Academie Minerva, Groningen (NL) in 1997. 

Recent exhibitions include Perrotin Tokyo (to 22 March), Perrotin Shanghai, Vandalorum, Värnamo, Waldemarsudde, Stockholm, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Reykjavik Art Museum, Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles, Inman Gallery, Houston, Västerås Art Museum, Sweden. Sandström's work is included in the collections of Moderna Museet, Public Art Agency Sweden, Malmö Art Museum, Borås Art Museum and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to name a few.

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