Dividers Collide 2008

Erik Sigerud’s ‘Dividers Collide’ is a wild collision of geometric forms and playful lines rendered with oil paint. Just imagine Sigerud in the studio, wrestling with perspective, pushing and pulling the space. What emerges isn't just an image, but a record of his thinking, a kind of visual diary of spatial experiments. I see the bold red and white stripes—they're not just decorations, they’re structural elements, like visual beams holding the whole thing together, but also pulling it apart. There's something so tactile about the way he applies the paint; you can almost feel the give and take of brush on canvas. That looping black line, it’s like a doodle, but it anchors the composition. Sigerud's got this uncanny ability to make a painting feel like it’s breathing, like it's still in process. You can see a conversation happening between him and other painters who came before. It all feels very alive, very now.