Swedish painter, Sigrid Sandstrom, exhibits twelve of her newest abstract paintings at The Company in downtown Los Angeles from March 14th through April 18th. Sandstrom’s strength is revealing the paradoxical in both painting and nature. Even the artist’s preferred technique is an oxymoron–the transparent layering of opaque whites. Decision making, editing, working, and reworking are crucial elements of Sandstrom’s finished work. She purposefully leaves behind squeegee smears, paint drips, and brush marks that not only reference her process, but also signifies her work. Milky acrylic washes, often of snowcapped mountains and angular glaciers, sit underneath layers of planar geometric shapes. The polygonal shapes contrast in a variety of ways: irregular vs. regular, convex vs. concave, and rough/torn edges vs. hard/masked edges. Though the shapes are painted, they are made to look as though they are torn paper collage, textured pieces of wood, or see-through strips of masking tape. The shapes’ faux edges are yet another reference to painterly fabrication and thus, process. In her artist statement, Sandstrom mentions ” the cumulative activity of adding layer-upon-layer is the evidential aftermath of mental engagement which, in turn, insinuates and provokes the next painterly response.” By constantly juggling interactive variables, the artist explores the self-reflexive nature of decision-making and the creative process.

In 1997, Sandstrom received her B.F.A. from Academie Minerva in The Netherlands, and in 2001, an M.F.A. in painting and printmaking from Yale University. She is the 2008 recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation: Painters and Sculptors Grant as well as the 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Sandstrom’s paintings are in permanent collections at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita KS; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Currently, she lives and works in Stockholm.

Each Sunday through 2010, we will be revisiting some of our favorite archived features from previous years. Today we have selected Albert Oehlen, a German artist featured during our second year of operation….

Albert Oehlen
Originally Published on December 24, 2007

Albert Oehlen, a German artist who currently lives and works in Bizkaia, Spain has been on the international radar for decades as a provocative painter. The artist studied with Sigmar Polke in the mid-seventies at Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst, Hamburg and emerged in the 1980’s along side artist Martin Kippenberger. Oehlen challenges painting today by rigorously investigating and referencing historical painting from many periods, simultaneously. The scope of his painting references allows the artist to point out some of art’s failures, something that Oehlen is very interested in revealing. The artist recently exhibited “Spiegelbilder” with Max Hetzler in Berlin, and “The Good Life” at the Nolan / Eckman Gallery in New York. Oehlen has appeared in countless publications, and in April of 2003 Artforum conducted an interview between Oehlen and Eric Banks.

Closing this week is a new exhibition of 40 watercolors and collages on paper by painter Tomory Dodge at CRG Gallery in New York. While the artist’s large and dynamic paintings have become very well known, it is much more rare to find an exhibition of his watercolors and collages. Many of the same themes run through these new works as are found in the artists larger paintings, such as the catastrophic and uncanny in relation to the landscape. Chaotic storms spread fragments of paper wildly across the pictorial space in Lost in the Woods, large strips of color fall from the an abstracted sky in Tweedle Dum, and in garbage floats placidly on top of a large body of water in Sea of Objects.  Each piece is carefully balanced between formal abstraction and representation, a signature element of the artist’s other work. The immediacy of these works on paper offers the viewer a welcome break from the more calculated larger paintings found the in artist’s oeuvres. These new collages and watercolors embody a more playful and carefree mode of creation, allowing for a less self conscious product to form.

Dodge’s Works on Paper were exhibited at ACME in Los Angeles from October 17 – November 14, 2009 and will be on view at CRG Gallery in New York through December 19th, 2009. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.