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.

On view through December 23, 2009 at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City is the new photographic series, The Fall, by Irish artist Richard Mosse. For the exhibition, Mosse has created a series of epic landscape-based documentary photographs that survey a variety of wreckage in remote locations such as the Patagonian Andes and the Yukon Territories. Images of downed planes, exploded cars, and dirt filled swimming pools become monolithic monuments of destruction, partially reclaimed by nature and left to slowly decompose. The artist embarked on this photographic journey as an embed with the US military. In a sense, the series is a rescue mission aimed at recovering, at least in image form, lost relics of globalization and archeology of our time.

The Fall marks the completion of the first year of a two-year Leonore Annenberg Fellowship in the Performing and Visual Arts. Mosse completed a postgraduate Degree in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University in London in 2005, and an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art in 2008. The artist’s work will be included in the upcoming Fotofest 2010 Biennial of Contemporary U.S. Photography, March 12 – April 25, 2010, Houston, TX.