MALMO.- Astrid Svangren (born in 1972) graduated from Malmö Art Academy a little more than ten years ago. Since then she has participated in a great number of solo and group exhibitions, where she has received a lot of attention for her painting and the visual worlds she creates. Today she lives and works in Copenhagen.

A process is made visible in her pictures, to become a woman, to become an artist, to paint and experiment with a number of materials. The ambivalence in the paintings, in combination with her choice of material, creates a tension that is used to describe the border between the illusory room of the painting, and the room and the material’s three-dimensional character.

Her painting seeks towards another order, she strives to break down hierarchies in the image space, to avoid any particular focus in the paintings. Instead there is a rich visual world that depicts events in different directions, figures that she herself describes as clumsy, imponderable and in movement. She often uses colored or see through acrylic glass and applies the color on both sides, thus creating a three-dimensional impression. This effect strengthens and deepens the relations that emerge in the pictures between figures, material and events.

One can easily get the feeling that Astrid Svangren collects her visual world from dreams. Poetic figures, both naked and dressed, emerge in the pictures, and is painted in a way that varies between a very gentle, small format, to violent and aggressive. Astrid Svangren says herself that she wants to capture an emotion, an experience or a mood, without being too specific.

During the last years her work has moved towards a greater spatialness, the pieces grows and claim the whole room. In her latest work she returns to using colours and figures, after having deepened in abstraction and dark, often black color scale. The difficult given and labyrinth-like spatialness that are being depicted in Astrid Svangrens images is now being moved into the existing room which makes the observer a part of the work. Her way of painting and choice of material problematize in a subtle way painting as media, and her image world puts vulnerability, identity and emotions hard to describe into focus.