Arranged to strangely echo kitschy magazine covers, Erik Mark Sandberg‘s paintings flip glamor on its head. The artist turns to pop culture and mass media as a starting point for his work, playing with the audience’s expectations by twisting the visual cues we have grown accustomed to from longterm exposure to consumer culture. With their neon color palettes set against starkly contrasting backgrounds, his paintings and sculptures emulate the sensory overload of advertisements in order to draw attention to how the psychological climate of our times has been shaped by image culture.
“The paintings are a continuation of exploring the relationships of projected idealized archetypes and the unattainable emulation of them. The rhizome like tailored hair forms are a metaphorical vehicle for this,” said Sandberg. “The portraits at times work as a snapshot of reverse Darwinism. The figures identity is tailored from YouTube, Hannah Montana discount calenders, and seductive advertising visuals. The language of painting is slower than the language of advertising, the works explore this while adhering to common historical connections in painting with variations of odalisque gestures.”
