The Brooklyn Rail

The overwhelming sensation that Sigrid Sandström’s nineteen paintings at Anat Ebgi in Tribeca impart is one of movement. In a 2021 exhibition catalogue, Amy Sillman wrote that Sandström’s paintings are “in motion … tumbling around as if they were in celestial dryers.” Indeed, big swipes of acrylic swoosh across the unprimed canvas of Dust Plunge (all works 2025), denim blues puddle and soak in Ravel II, and the white puff of a decidedly cloudlike form floats in Nimbus. It is as if the paintings take compositional cues from diagrams of wave anatomy, alluding both to the aquatic and the atmospheric realms. Spending time in the show was, for me, a process of questioning how and why the works evoke implied actions: to soak, to float, to unfurl, to swell, to billow, to undulate, and, depending where you look, to stay put.

Ultimately, these terms are helpful because they give the paintings a foothold in the world of lived experience without relying on familiar strategies of depiction. The deepest pleasure of Sandström’s paintings comes from giving up the search for what generated them and getting lost instead in their almost philosophical proposals about the fleeting, invisible operations that enliven our world—as well as painting’s capacity to embody them. Among the paintings’ great strengths is this capaciousness, whose limits are marked out by formal choices indicating at least two intersections with the history of abstraction.

The first of these allusions emerges if a viewer comes to understand Sandström’s marks as telling the story of process and a particular painting’s coming-into-being. This has been part and parcel of the history of American abstraction since Helen Frankenthaler’s 1952 stained canvases, and earlier, Jackson Pollock’s drips of 1947. The same has been true in Europe since the 1950s (Sandström was born in Sweden in 1970 and came to New York for art school in 1995), when earlier proximity to the ideas of phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty began to shape the development of abstract painting. Sandström’s current works seem to operate within this latter trajectory which is about an embodied way of thinking that works through the emergence of form, rather than the lack of a body presumed by mid-century American high modernism.

Here marks develop only in the act of making: the black swipes in Ravel V that imprecisely echo the tangerine stains below are not preconceived, but instead materialize only through the thinking made possible by the movements of Sandström’s hand and body. All of this is almost like a form of research. Process is especially evident in Verso I-II, a diptych that assistants at Anat Ebgi will take off the wall so visitors can see the mountain-like remainders of peachy and plum pinks that bled through to the back of the canvas. Any residue of the conventions of landscape or calligraphy is present only insofar as these conventions have been assimilated by the artist’s subconscious bank of sources. The work is not simply an index of an action; each mark instantiates deep thinking.

Another possibility, not mutually exclusive with the first, is that the paintings’ evocation of motion looks outward to the observed world and a baseline familiarity with phenomena of movement—everyday experiences like watching the tide coming in or smoke curling off an extinguished wick. Sandström’s work allows the viewer to make a range of associations, but by short-circuiting straightforward depiction of recognizable objects or actions, it remains fully abstract. Along these lines, Sandström effectively deploys devices from representational art while subverting their conventional function, resulting in associations that seem familiar—but different.

For example, a painted dot appears throughout the show. Like a vanishing point, it locates us in space. But unlike linear perspective, Sandström’s work lacks architectural elements or any kind of coherent dimensional geometry. The dot’s variable size from painting to painting suggests our relative distance from each canvas’s abstract terrain, as if gently nudging us farther or closer to each work as we move through the gallery. The dot accommodates viewers’ bodies in the space of painting, without dictating our location or vantage point. We are things among things, shifting in ebbs and flows along with the world around us, part of a contextual web that also includes the paintings.

Sandström’s work keeps at bay the concreteness of things as we know them, allowing us instead to consider the rarely-questioned phenomena—the verbs—that govern our lived experience.