Sixten Sandra Österberg - Shifts: Stockholm
The changing seasons have always anchored humankind in time, and have been associated with both transience and rebirth. In a Nordic context, the contrasts between winter and summer are striking - even in a contemporary, urban setting - and affect those who live through them on both a practical and a mental level. In her new works, Sixten Sandra Österberg reflects on this subject, and for her the seasons have become a way of exploring questions about time: how it passes, how it changes us and how we age. Rather than depicting specific landscapes, or the body as a motif within them, she has sought, on a more introspective level, to portray humanity in interaction with the seasons.
The works in the exhibition often focus on fine detail or draw close to the people and objects they depict: a glance down at shoes on a snow-swept surface, a wreath woven in summer, or a narrowly framed bedroom scene. The works in the exhibition are full of contrasts, both in relation to one another and within the individual paintings. Darkness is set against light, warmth against cold, and the elements are contrasted with one another. The seasons and their changes are depicted more or less clearly in the motifs and can be perceived through a detail, a view out of a window, or in the movement of turning one's face towards the first warm rays of spring sunlight. What the works in the exhibition have in common is that the seasons are allowed to emerge through people and their gestures rather than through the depiction of nature itself.
Contrasts are also evident in a very tangible way in Sixten Sandra Österberg's paintings. Within a single painting, richly detailed and finely rendered areas often contrast with sections featuring free brushstrokes and impasto. These contrasts create a sense of movement across the canvas, and as a painter, Österberg finds the freedom to seek the ideal, painterly expression for each object in its own right. At first glance, her subjects appear to be based on a single model, but each painting is a constructed universe in which she intuitively brings together elements from various sources. The process is reminiscent of Pre-Impressionist landscape painting, where the painter would take impressions and sketches from nature back to the studio to piece together an idealised version of nature there. In her painterly process, Österberg does not in any way seek to depict an ideal, but just like the Pre-Impressionist painter, she guides our gaze. In the contrast between the staged and the seemingly lifelike, Österberg has created a unique visual world.
Sixten Sandra Österberg (b. 1990) resides and works in Stockholm. She graduated in 2022 with an MFA from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and holds a BFA from Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts. She has also completed an exchange year at the Vienna Academy of the Arts. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Company Gallery, New York; Green Family Art Foundation: Dallas; and Magasin III - Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm. Her works are included in several public collection including Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Magasin III - Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg; The Swedish National Portrait Gallery, Stockholm, as well as in private collections in Sweden and the United States.
