I speak
in ruffles crepe
candid
without mystification like the colour of a gazelle’s belly
sprout-green crushed orange pulp
pink yellow or apple-green
painstakingly straight, 2011
With its all-glass walls, displays in the Spetsen Gallery are as much for passers-by on the street outside and people travelling by on the train, as they are for gallery visitors. The transparency and the curved shape of Spetsen provide enormous possibilities as well as great challenges for the artists who tackle it. It is a difficult exhibition space, and thus extraordinarily interesting.
Astrid Svangren’s paintings harbour inner tensions and conflicts. This is the figurative versus the abstract; delicate drawings versus messy, heavily applied paint; narratives and themes versus spontaneous movements.
Recently, Astrid Svangren’s paintings have moved out into the space around them. New surfaces and materials are explored – Plexiglas leaning against the wall, objects reminiscent of furniture, drafting film and fabric that has been folded and stretched. Svangren makes the exhibition space part of her painting – or if looked at in another way, her painting creates a spatial framework for the visitors’ experience of the space, in this case the Spetsen Gallery.
