Friday, October 18, 2024

Erik Sandberg at CONNERSMITH

Erick Thor Sandberg
One of the most talented and gifted DMV area painters is Erik Sandberg, a fabulous artist whose career I’ve been following since he was an art student at George Mason University under the great Margarida Kendall.

Sandberg is currently exhibiting at CONNERSMITH and we are told that “this final work in his most recent cycle of paintings exemplifies the artist’s acclaimed Surrealist expression of contemporary humanism. Sandberg sets forth a vivid allegory of our relationships to one another and nature in “Bramble” with multiple human and animal figures who coexist in their own world.

Grounded in cohering elements of earth, trees and grass, the jumble of interwoven figures - five humans, a fox, a rabbit, a monkey and a crocodile - appears to revolve in empty space. In their actions and gestures, Sandberg conceptualizes dynamics among members of a household, community, or society which function as a singular organism. The characters, at odds with their circumstances, move in disparate directions, either struggling to stop, or redirect, the revolving construct, or attempting to destroy the barriers that separate them.”