ASTRID SVANGREN
rebellious rosebuds exist
drenched sponge and days exist
hypersensitive honeybee and my skin exist
reflection, projection and repetition exist
memory and elixir of light do not exist
22 AUGUST – 22 SEPTEMBER 2024
REVIEWED BY
KONSTEN.NET
4 SEPTEMBER
KUNSTKRITIKK
6 SEPTEMBER
The painter Astrid Svangren has made use of methods associated with textile and recycled pieces of material (for instance a vintage wide-meshed black hat veil reminiscent of chicken wire) or memory-images of situations involving lengths of unadorned fabric (like the time when she found all the holy images in a church in Mexico City cloaked in purple, suddenly featureless).
Svangren bundles horsehair together in slender strains and shapes these into interlocking circles that look like rudimentary lace in exaggerated close-up. She pins and unpins, attaches and detaches, combines and recombines, squeezing one material into another (balls of silver foil into silk chiffon, in one of the works in this exhibition) and making them do a complicated little dance that always – and this is imperative – speaks to the idea that all of this could have been something else. And maybe it will be, next time she decides to make work.
Svangren has mastered the art of being a painter without having to actually paint, of achieving ephemeral images that don’t undermine her quest for a highway to retinal truth. She aims at a lightness shed of all suspicion of being lightweight. Although her new work embraces hybridity both strategically and tactically (over time and in each individual piece), we can confidently claim it for painting, because her thinking is that of a painter. These new works, not individually titled but channeling an overall exhibition title that no one can remember, reverberates with open form and material experimentation. They reconnect us, as viewers, to the predicament of painting today.
Some of the best painting is now made by very experienced female artists – Lynda Benglis comes to mind, or Lili Dujourie – who pay little respect to established boundaries between painting and sculpture, images and objects, fine and applied art. They offer colour and form, content and vision, but not necessarily in the places or in the order that we have come to expect. Nor, indeed, do they always play by the rule that wants painting to stay attached to a flat surface. Svangren is well on her way to achieving the status of being such an uncompromising, and at the same time laid-back, path-breaker herself.
This time she has been ogling the achievements of other female role models – the horsehair and hat veil pieces may contain traces of Eva Hesse or GeGo – but only from the corner of her eye, not as part of a deliberate programme of self-education through rediscovered icons of modernism. Most artists attempt some form of dialogue with other artists but end up asking themselves if they are not performing alone in the arena. Svangren has not attempted to contact or confront her elective affinities directly. Instead she has listened both inwards and outwards, to her demons (as they used to be known in nineteenth-century novels) and to her various found materials. She has played and she has allowed herself to be played.
Anders Kreuger
Photos Mathias Johansson
ASTRID SVANGREN, born 1972 in Gothenburg, currently lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Astrid Svangren holds a MFA from Malmö Art Academy, 1998.
Astrid Svangren´s work has been shown at Den Frie, Copenhagen, Quartz Studio, Turin; Kohta, Helsinki; Art Basel, Miami Beach; Gl. Holtegaard, Copenhagen; Moderna Museet, Malmö; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Malmö Konstmuseum; Kiasma, Helsinki; Wanås Konst, Knislinge; Artipelag, Stockholm; Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Skärhamn; The Margulies Collection, Miami; Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris; Tracy Williams, Ltd, New York; Maria Stenfors, London; Christian Andersen, Copenhagen; KUNSTHALLE São Paulo; and KRAFT, Bergen, among others.
In 2024 Svangren received Axel Theofron Sandbergs Akvarellpris. She has also received grants from The Danish Arts Council; The Swedish Arts Grants Committee; Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation; The Edstrand Foundation, among others. In 2017 Astrid Svangren received the Award for Excellence in Exhibition from the Danish Arts Council.
Astrid Svangren’s work is in the permanent collection of The National Gallery of Denmark; The Danish Arts Foundation; New Carlsberg Foundation, Copenhagen; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Public Art Council Sweden; Stockholm School of Economics; Göteborgs kommun; Ystad Art Museum; Malmö Art Museum; Helsingborg Art Museum; Gothenburg Art Museum; The Nordic Watercolour Museum, Skärhamn; Lunds kommun; and The Margulies Collection, Miami, among others.
Astrid Svangren has done public commissions for Bredan Daghem in Lund, in coorporation with Lunds konsthall; Hemstagården in Gävle, in cooperation with Gävle Konstcentrum; UMAS Barnkliniken, Malmö; and for The Nordic Public Art Council at C4-Skolan in Kristianstad, Sweden.
UPCOMING 2024
Hå Gamle Prestegard, Nærbø, Norway, 14 September – 3 November, 2024 (Duo with Else Leirvik)
The Museum Ciudad Querétaro, México, 18 October – 1 December, 2024 (Group show)