Sandy Skoglund.

Sandy Skoglund.

American artist Sandy Skoglund may be one of todays most visually stunning tableau photographers. Her color-drenched images are reminiscent of artist such as Magritte, Dali and even Jeff Koons or film maker David Lynch, but these incredibly surreal prints are not more than just a mean to a much richer aspect of the work. 

With a background in painting and sculpture Skoglund does not define herself as a photographer; photography does play a key aspect of her work but not the main and central one. She paints and sculpts all elements in her sets and then photographs them, the final outcome is not just the photographic print but also the three-dimensional installation, both works presented in the same hierarchic level.

 The artist always felt bored by direct classic photography and felt fascinated with the anti esthetic the work of Ed Ruscha. What she basically values in photographic creation is the calculability and manipulability of the end product, also the contradiction between being and seeming, reality and artificiality. Although Skoglund’s oeuvre appears to be deeply referential to surrealist and Dadaist painting it also reveals the inspiration of much more trivial influences. Disneyland and the color of American West-Coast photography have left a mark in Skoglund's work. It also presents traces of American horror films and, naturally, the anxieties of middle-class America, which Skoglund handles with ironic flair.