Tom Sandberg (1953–2014; born in Narvik, Norway) worked and lived in Oslo. In the early 1970s, he studied photography at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, UK, where Thomas Joshua Cooper, Paul Hill, and Minor White were among his teachers. Sandberg’s early work was among the first acquisitions of photography by the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. His work is held in the collections of numerous other museums, as well as in public and private collections, including those of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Pico Iyer is author of fifteen books translated into twenty-three languages, including The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere (2014). He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among many other publications. Bob Nickas is a writer and curator based in New York. He has organized more than one hundred exhibitions since 1984, including, Tom Sandberg: Photographs 1989–2006. Among his other shows at MoMA PS1 are Wolfgang Tillmans: Freedom from the Known; Stephen Shore: American Surfaces; Lee Lozano: Drawn from Life, 1961–1971; William Gedney—Christopher Wool: Into the Night; a Peter Hujar survey; and projects with Charles Atlas, Trisha Donnelly, and Torbjørn Rødland. Nickas’s books include Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting (2009) and four collections of his writing and interviews: Live Free or Die (2000), Theft Is Vision (2008), The Dept. of Corrections (2015), and Komplaint Dept. (2018). Torunn Liven is an art historian and writer based in Oslo.
There's something close to religious about this ghostly work....at heart, he's giving us not just the world but all that cannot be shown and can never be seen. -Pico Iyer