Existing comment:
"I paint about less fun parts of life with signs of hope"
-- Erik Thor Sandberg
Erik Thor Sandberg's paintings are a foray into the uncanny. They are strange and uncomfortable, at once foreign and familiar. Depicting what looks like domestic scenes from everyday life rendered in a naturalistic manner and with a masterful technique, Sandberg's works are reminiscent of seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish genre painting. Populated by odd and often menacing-looking characters caught in obscene situations or cruel actions, they produce phantasmagoric and even absurdist scenarios.
Playing off the polarities of compulsion and inertia, prudence and recklessness, humility and humiliation, and violence and vulnerability, they are also about unfulfilled desires, lack of communication, and misunderstanding. They may be considered moral tales not because they preach justice, but because they push the boundaries of what is considered "normal" and socially acceptable and thus raise questions about what constitutes judgment.
Excerpt from the catalogue essay by Vesela Sretenovic |