COLOUR THEORY

Sigrid Szetu is a Norwegian painter working in an abstract expressionistic landscape of colour composition and collage. After graduating from Camberwell School of Art in 1976, she moved to the South-East-Asian island of Borneo which has left an indelible mark on her work and life. 

Upon her return to Norway in 1983, Sigrid co-founded the international art foundation 3,14 allowing her to be one of the first western contemporary artists to exhibit at the national galleries of Calcutta, Beijing and Ulan Bator during the final days of the Cold War.

Her latest series of paintings is a culmination of a process which began in 2001 when she started cutting up failed paintings and reassembling them into new collages. 

Her work has moved steadily into ever more abstract terrain, where recognisable figures have given way to a deep and delicate study of form and colour, more akin to free jazz improvisation than traditional painting. Here the smallest modulation of colour and geometry creates a myriad of untameable outcomes. Walking this knife's edge between the visible and invisible, the artist explains that she feels like an unwitting antennae receiving signals from something or somewhere that is beyond knowing.

At present she is collaborating with a scientist from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim to understand and explore the connection between colours and sound.