Unravel the meanings in the creations of Erik Thor Sandberg can be a complicated task, almost as much as defining the nature of his work, especially considering that, as he says, the symbolism of his allegories may have originated in his own life circumstances. In any case, Erik is a remarkable painter, with a technical quality out of the question and the ability to compose fascinating images, playing with balance between the beautiful and the grotesque.

Age is pitted against youth in Swing, in which an old man--bearded and clad in only a loincloth, resembling a Saint Jerome by Jusepe de Ribera--prepares to take an ax to a dead tree. Four young adults cling to its branches, each teen wearing an expression of complete self-absorption, apparently oblivious to the danger that awaits. They each hold on to objects that might represent the complications of their lives; a toy sailboat signifying the joys and traumas of childhood; a saw for building or cutting one's losses; and a fluttering bird tethered to a string, standing for the inability to escape and start anew. In the end, however, Father Time will chop down the tree and their lives will be over, rendering earthly trifles meaningless.

Erik Thor Sandberg was born in Quantico, VA in 1975. He's based in Washington, DC.

Sandberg is known for his masterful oil paintings of the human figure and landscape. Creating inventive imagery ranging from panoramic to intimate, Sandberg pushes the skillful illusionism of master painting to the contemporary edge of Magic Realism. His work has been exhibited at public and private venues internationally, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD, and is in numerous private collections.

Erik approaches each composition as if it were a conversation between the artist and the viewer. The dialogue thus generated by his work always questions and attempts to define human identity (and scraps thereof). Using symbolism both established and personal, Sandberg creates narratives without definitive beginnings or ends; he captures pivotal moments and isolates them from time. Upon these suspended moments, the artist abstains from casting judgment and rather, empathizes with the figures that are often transfixed by self-wrought disaster. Traditionally, Sandberg’s work has depicted secular scenes of vice and virtue from a standpoint that human nature is inherently flawed. More recently, these fundamental flaws in life have continued to draw Sandberg to dissect and expose pieces of human nature. His skillfully crafted images, both miniature and larger than life, reveal the unexpected way in which imperfection makes life interesting. How often the disturbing and the grotesque capture the viewer’s gaze before the beautiful! Yet, beauty, eternally appreciated, remains an essential component of Sandberg’s work as it contrasts the unsettling and unsightly elements of these imaginary worlds that hinge, unsettlingly, on the verge of our own.

The complexity of human nature has long fascinated Sandberg. His art is driven by his meditations on our propensity for both stunning kindness and barbarity, our vices and follies, and our remarkable capacity for perseverance and hope. As he once defined his influences: “I find the fallibility of man to be the subject that I connect with the most in most artwork.”

Course features four teens on a leafy knoll with a mountainous backdrop. Two of the girls, apparently dead, lie side by side with a sapling growing from each of their stomachs; Sandberg appears to touch upon death's relationship to rebirth and regeneration, just as Anselm Kiefer does in Man Lying with Branchy 1971, a small watercolor depicting a tree growing from a man's chest. A remaining girl stands in a contrapposto pose between the two trees, while her companion, a boy, crouches near one of the prone girls. The expressions of both indicates anxiety, unease, and vulnerability. Why are they alive and the others no? What will life bring next?

«I joke and say that I paint naked people doing horrible things to each other. But the real answer is that my paintings are allegories, sometimes that relate to my life, other times that are random. I'm not really into weird, horrible things.»

«I'm not at all religious, but I think vices are something we all suffer from. They're also what entertain us. If your don't have a vice in a story, it'd be pretty boring. But it's also what bothers me about people.»

Realism depends on the representation of form through light and dark values, and the simulation of texture, be it stone, dirt, foliage, or flesh. Fittingly, the works in the front gallery, Sandberg’s "Reparatory Gestures," [his Sept. 2011 solo show] possess all of these qualities. The architecture of four 88-inch-long curved panels commands the space, as the panoramic tales of nature’s resurgence over man stretches into the gallery.

"Receptivity" immediately captures your attention: A nude woman sits on a rock as countless varieties of birds, stretching across the sky into the horizon, land next to her and lay eggs at her feet. Even flightless birds, like ostriches and emus, share the craggy knoll with the woman. Sandberg's technical skill illustrating the variety within the species is impressive, and it serves as a visual metaphor for variation within all species. But these birds from various continents and temperate zones are clustered together in one composition, and so Sandberg's work takes a turn toward the surreal. Sure, there are no melting clocks, but calling this "realism" doesn't feel quite right.

When things start to get strange, at what point has realism become surrealism? When you've included enough birds to make Artemis, the Greek goddess of wild animals, nervous? When you have a dozen nude women wrestling on a picnic table while a stuffed animal roasts on an open grill, as depicted in another painting? Undoubtedly, everything in these paintings is representational. But realism?

«When I was in undergrad, they taught me how to think about painting, not how to paint. It took me a long time to figure out how to glaze. If most painters knew how to glaze, they'd be doing it. I think people aren't playing with the medium enough.»

«People need to look at what the figures are doing rather their nakedness. Children actually have an easier time reading my paintings than adults, who want to look at genitals and laugh about it. It's the kid who'll say 'That person is angry', and read it like the narrative that it is.»

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