Penumbra

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Penumbra, a solo exhibition by Swedish artist Sigrid Sandström. This is Sandström's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and presents new paintings all made during 2025. Rising and dissolving like weather fronts, Sigrid Sandström's colors pool, seep, and bleed into one another with the liquidity of atmosphere. Her elemental abstractions conjure storms, skies, seas, and celestial bodies, as she explores painting's capacity to give form to that which is fleeting, immaterial, and beyond human scale. Working within the history of Abstraction, Sandström draws inspiration from disciplines spanning geography, sociology, and philosophy as a sustained meditation on color, gesture, and the mutable forces of the natural world. Control and accident are structuring principals as she builds surfaces through a unification of gesture and form. Sandström's hand is ever present; it circles, elongates, collapses, draws, washes, blends, stiffens, harmonizes, organizes, quiets, and brightens with exacting intention. Meanwhile the paint, an unruly body, stains, seeps, covers, leeches, and dissolves—soaking through the weave of the raw canvas obeying its own material laws and properties. Vapors, gravities, sensory unities, animate each composition. These are physical conditions: forces subject to absorption and dispersion, orchestrated by Sandström, pushing toward a delicate compositional balance. Her marks emphasize fluidity, chance, and permeability. Acrylic, thinned to the consistency of watercolor, sodden the canvas while feathering at the edges. Here we discover the gravity of pigment; at times it blooms into dense knots of darkness, while at others it dissolves into vaporous veils. These variations of measured formation and collapsing loss capture the agency of the artist's hand against the autonomy of her materials, situating the work within a lineage of movement, process, and action painting. Planetary and geometric, a small circular motif appears across Sandström's canvases. These small orbs—dots, discs, balls—anchor and punctuate otherwise diffuse and yielding fields. Sometimes rendered as precise red, or pale white points, the glowing orbs are interjections, dense counterweights, they serve as cosmological markers or exclamations. They suggest suns, moons, or planets, orienting the gaze in relation to vast atmospheric washes. Their recurrence imbues the work with a sense of continuity and links individual paintings to one another, to the process of looking, to cycles, to unfolding time. Penumbra is both astronomical phenomena and metaphor. It refers to the dim, partial region at the edge of a shadow, a fading outer region, the softening boundary where light and darkness commingle. Not entirely occluded, it is relational and conditional, its presence is dependent on another body's cast. Sandström's paintings inhabit this zone of suspended looking, the penumbral coexistence of opposing forces, where the eye wanders along the luminous edge of dissolving darkness. Sigrid Sandström (b. 1970, Stockholm, Sweden) studied at Cooper Union School of Art, New York, NY (1995); earned a BFA at Academie Minerva, Groningen, The Netherlands (1997); attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (2000); and received an MFA in Painting from Yale University, New Haven, CT (2001). Residencies, grants and fellowships include Stiftung Kunstdepot Artist Residency, Göschenen, Switzerland, 2023, Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France (2018), The 2008 Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, New York (2008). Sandström was a recipient of a Core fellowship at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2001-2003). Sandström's work is in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden; Malmö konstmuseum, Malmö, Sweden; The Public art Agency, Sweden; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS; Västerås konstmuseum, Västerås, Sweden, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Sandström is currently a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts, Helsinki, and has previously held positions as a professor at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2010-2020) and an Assistant Professor at Bard College, New York (2005-2010). Sandström lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

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