These Conditions

Sarah von Sydow (b. 1987) is a Swedish-American painter working in oil whose practice draws on devotional image traditions (Pennsylvania Fraktur, emblem books, theorem painting, and 18th and 19th-century textiles) as systems of knowledge developed largely outside sanctioned institutional contexts. Her work constructs small physical arrangements of objects, drawn from the natural world, which are then painted through a process of grisaille underpainting and layered color. The resulting images treat recurring forms as working elements with their own agency as well as symbolic fragments to be read. Von Sydow studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York, where she received a BFA with honors in 2009. Her teachers included Jack Whitten, Mary Heilmann, Alice Aycock, Peter Heinemann, and Judith Linhares. She received an M.Ed in Art from Umeå University in 2021 and spent several years teaching studio art in Swedish public schools. She currently works full-time in her studio in Stockholm, Sweden. Her work was recently shown at Konstnärshuset, Stockholm, in an exhibition dedicated to the rediscovered Swedish modernist Gudrun Key-Åberg.