Teeth Like Rowanberries

The two artists Astrid Svangren and Magdalena Drwiega are juxtaposed in Teeth Like Rowanberries. Their different approach with colour, space and form are presented in unison. As painters, both artist bring their original discipline into physicality, the third dimension.

Astrid Svangren uses textures, layers and graduating tones to achieve her poetry. Using many diverse materials, often brittle, textured and diaphanous, shaping them into often large cascading works her pieces make coy and dramatic statements with an ethereal quality. Her work is gestural, like a painting let loose, like a theory becoming manifest. Incorporating brush strokes, marks, indentations, creases, pigmentation, stains with a dramatic density and fragility.

Magdalena Drwiega favours primary colours to express emotions like vitality, bewilderment, surprise and joy, In unapologetic directness using commonplace materials. The artist fuses the humble with strength and confidence, the comical with the perplexing and puzzling to creating diverse objects some allowing for movement, reacting to the viewer. Each sculpture has an epic, individual quality at times timid or heroic as well as a self-referential title. Each object expresses character, modest yet complex, jesting with colour and structure. Solidity and weightlessness are at play. Drwiega’s work exudes a poetic atmosphere suggesting an infinite nothingness.

“The highest bodily beauty exists only in man and in him only because of the ideal… there is no ideal of that in which nature has proposed herself nothing definite.”