Sven Sandberg

Beneath What Skies

V1 SALON is pleased to present

Beneath What Skies 
A solo exhibition by Sven Sandberg
February 5 – 28, 2026

The crystal always lives at the limit, it is itself the vanishing limit between the immediate past which is already no longer and the immediate future which is not yet.

–       Gilles Deleuze, “The Crystals of Time” (1985)

 
Sven Sandberg’s motifs are rooted in familiar moments – perhaps a version of the pictures exists in your own memories: walking past a ranch on a summer day; adjusting your clothing, lost in thought. Sometimes, these images evoke an uncanny form of déjà vu, as if you’re recalling memories that aren’t your own.

Sandberg’s images, drawn from a whirlpool of personal recollection, become actualised through paint, yet they remain in flux. Even fixed on canvas, they suggest a time that is always just out of reach: a past, future, and present existing outside the painting’s time and space. This is what Deleuze calls the crystal image: “the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time.” In Sandberg’s paintings, we are exposed to this collapse of time, where past and present coexist.

In Green Henry, a person sits on the shore, looking towards the horizon. Was Sandberg there as well? Are we looking through the memory of his eyes? What are they looking towards? What came before this moment? Viewing the painting, these questions of their past, present, and future remains hidden. In the painting, the past of the memory meets the present of the canvas and the future of our forthcoming memories.

 
In this sense, Sandberg’s paintings are works of change through memory, transformation through consumption. As we look, we change, alongside the painting; reflected through invisible crystals, we both emerge anew. This concept is captured by Paul Valéry in his poem The Cemetery by the Sea (1920, translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody):


As fruit dissolves in consummation,
As it transforms its absence to delight
When in a mouth its form is lost and dies,
I breathe the smoke I will become
And the sky sings, of shores transformed
To rumour, to the soul that is consumed.
 

Brilliant sky, true sky, it is I
Who change! After such pride, after such strange
Indolence, and yet suffused with power,
I surrender to this shining air,
My shadow sweeps the houses of the dead
And with its fragile motion leads me on.
 

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Sven Sandberg (b. 1983), lives and works in Northern California, USA. He graduated with an MFA from the National College of Art & Design, Dublin, Ireland, in 2016. He’s recently exhibited at: Richard F. Brush Gallery, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York (2024); Katie Lindsay Gallery, Killyleagh, Northern Ireland (2022); Berlin Opticians Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2020)