Svartlöga – min kärlek

New book on Svartlöga and Staffan Sandler’s painting is published in conjunction with the third exhibition at Galleri Agardh-Tornvall in Stockholm, May 9th–19th 2019. The island Svartlöga, Sandler’s loving residence in the Stockholm archipelago, meets the summer visitors with bays and magpies, cliffs, piers and flowery fields. During the winter, the island is different – white painted above the resting grey and with as thin strings of blue, pink and yellow that perhaps only the trained artist’s eye notices it.

Staffan Sandler lives since four decades at Svartlöga for long periods, at a homestead from the 18th century on the south side of the island towards the wide-open ocean. In colour intensive oil painting, he depicts Svartlöga and the outer archipelago with far more nuances and layers of reality than what the summer residents and tourists on day trips imagine. Here, the heavenly blue and the ocean blue meet, sometimes as gently that the horizon is blurred. Here, the wind heaves its anger over the ocean, which responds with hard, greyish green and white-foamed waves. Here, the lichens and the yellow stonecrop slowly but steadily conquer rocks and crevices. Here, the off-white fog rolls in with its silence and erases the world.

The outer archipelago is an adventure that on the Sandlerian canvases little by little invites the observer on a journey in time and space. Sandler is a member of Roslagens Konstnärsgille, and regularly exhibits in Stockholm, Uppsala and Norrtälje. The exhibition is his third at Galleri Agardh-Tornvall in Stockholm and his 24th in total since the debut in Stockholm in 2006. In Uppsala, he exhibits at Galleri Mollbrink.

Staffan Sandler is an autodidact as practicing artist. As entrepreneur, he has a solid education and artistic experience within the frame of his own company Sandler Mergel Design AB – within graphic design, publishing- and art exhibition activity – which he ran with his wife Helene Mergel Sandler in Stockholm for 28 years. In conjunction with the exhibition, Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing – along with the writer and poet Lena Köster – publish the third part of Sandler’s book series on Svartlöga: Svartlöga: My Love.

www.agardh-tornvall.se