In the year 2000, while she was getting her MFA at Yale, the Swedish artist Sigrid Sandström ran away to Maine for a summer residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. It was a turning point. “That’s when I started painting landscapes, because it’s basically identical to the Swedish land,” Sandström says. “The lilacs were a little bigger, they bloomed later. Their foxes had different noses. But I recognized every tree type—it was almost like a distorted memory.”
Since then, Sandström, 55, has made the compelling case that a landscape is not just a field or a mountain or a pond; it’s a psychological space as much as a physical one. Her scenes can be muted and desolate, like a pasture stuck between winter and spring, or they can dazzle like the setting sun, and churn like the sea after a storm. In one recent painting, the five-feet-tall Nubes, a cloud-like puff is surrounded by swirls of blue and pale yellow—both playful and ominous. “I’m interested in things that are somehow emotive, unclear, unresolved,” she says.
Sandström’s home base is Stockholm, where she lives with her husband, an architecture professor at Lund University, and their 15-year-old daughter. But when we speak this past summer, she’s about two hours west, in her studio at their country house near the small city of Örebro. She’s had a busy few years. In the last two alone she’s exhibited in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and she has just confirmed a show with Perrotin gallery in London for next March. But her focus right now is this fall, when her latest suite of large abstract paintings will go on view in New York City at Anat Ebgi gallery. It will be her first solo exhibition in the city in over a decade.
Sandström favors the quick-drying tempo of acrylic paint over oils, and she has long used techniques like staining, smearing, splattering, and printing to layer in texture. Color-wise, the new works are bolder, fiercer. She took inspiration from the early Renaissance, especially the frescoes of Giotto and Fra Angelico. “I’ve been thinking about the robes forever, to mix pink and orange and this purple,” Sandström says.
“She has this really confident way with scale and with color, and how she conceptualizes each of the paintings,” says gallery founder Anat Ebgi. The two women met more than 20 years ago when Ebgi was a young curator in New York City going on as many studio visits as she could. She’d ask the artists she visited to refer her to other studios she should pay attention to, and Sandström was an emphatic recommendation from a former Yale classmate. “I immediately fell in love with what Sigrid was doing,” Ebgi says. “She would have an old pair of jeans that she would dip into paint and put onto the canvas. She created these abstractions that were very personal.”
Sandström was born in Stockholm to an architect mother and an engineer father. She wasn’t one of those kids who always wanted to be an artist. “That was not something I knew of, as a profession,” she says. But she had a talent for drawing, and she’d make sketches of people and their horses when they visited her family’s home. “That was an exciting feeling, that I knew how to do something.” She was a good student, but in her late teens she felt a bit lost, like a bystander waiting for something to happen, unsure of what. As a therapeutic exercise, she started taking summer painting courses. It helped. “I really am a strong believer that painting can serve as a tool to access things you can’t articulate any other way,” she says.
For undergrad she enrolled in Academie Minerva, an art school in the Netherlands. She took advantage of its exchange program with Cooper Union, and arrived in New York City in 1995. “That’s when everything changed. That’s when I became a happy person,” she tells me, grinning. Sandström loved how devoted to art her fellow students were, and that in the big city she could blend in, Swedish accent and all. After graduating from Minerva she was accepted into Yale’s rigorous MFA program—at a “very ironic and cynical” time in the art world, she says. “And painting, of course, it’d been ‘dead’ many times.” But then came that pivotal summer break in Maine, where something clicked.
The next stop in her nomadic early career was Texas, where she had a two-year residency at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “It was like graduate school without the pressure,” Sandström recalls. Crucially, her time there also introduced her to a landscape unlike anything she had experienced in Sweden or the Eastern US. In Texas it was almost always summer, the sky was almost always blue, and driving (so much driving!) through the state’s plains and swamplands fascinated her. “It could be almost sublime, grand. Everything was more,” she says.
She ended up staying in the US for more than 15 years, teaching at Bard, winning a Guggenheim fellowship, and marrying her husband (a fellow Swede) at New York’s City Hall. A position at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art took them back to Sweden in 2010, where they have been based ever since.
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These days, when she’s not in the studio, Sandström is out hiking in the Nordic countryside or reading: She just finished Canadian singer Tanya Tagaq’s novel Split Tooth, about a young Inuk woman growing up in the Arctic in the 1970s, and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s So Much Longing in So Little Space, on Edvard Munch. She’s also been rereading chapters of the Taoist text Zhuangzi, which has inspired her fall show. Recent trips to China and Japan reawakened her interest in Eastern art history and philosophy, “which is so much about being in the unknown,” Sandström says. She is leaning into this tug between shape and void, apparent in paintings like Descent, which goes from turbulent seascape to tranquil sunrise as you look from bottom to top. “We need both, absence and presence,” she says. “It’s like breathing: You can’t breathe in if you don’t breathe out.”
It’s this engaging approach that first drew fellow painter Lisa Sanditz to a Sandström painting she saw at a group show more than two decades ago. She passed along her compliments to Sandström that night, and the two have been not only friends but sounding boards for each other’s work ever since. “Sigrid is so deep and thoughtful, but also really lovely and generous and supportive,” Sanditz says. “She has this very well-rounded depth and lightness. And I think her paintings show that too.”
Sandström does not pre-plan her compositions. Instead, she is guided by instinct. This can result in delightful surprises. Recently she has been adding small, vivid discs of color to her canvases, which draw in the eye and almost distort the scale of the whole painting. “I just realized that my graduation piece had hundreds of these kinds of moons,” she says, breaking into a gentle laugh. It wasn’t conscious, but there they were, 25 years later—little beacons of light pointing to both past and future.
“Sigrid Sandström: Penumbra” is on view at Anat Ebgi through December 20.