About
Martin Strid is a Stockholm-based painter.
Working in acrylic and oil on canvas, his practice asks how minds organize complexity: through pattern, mathematics, and the visual grammar of neuroscience. The paintings are built to be lived with, alive rather than static, shifting with the light and with your mood.
The 2024 debut exhibition Familiar Unknown collected six years of this work. Read more about the thinking behind it in the concept and the process.
Exhibitions
- Familiar Unknown, solo, Stockholm, October 2024
Words
Real art may reorganise your mind. Great art may undress your mind.
Fundamental is pattern and relationship, not the entities that are patterned and related.
You see something when you have the right metaphor to perceive it.
Everything is what it is and not another thing.
Every deep truth has an equally true opposite.
The devil is in the detail. The beauty is in the gestalt.
Meaning derives from the existence of, and a proper delight in, recognisable patterns.
Eternity has no center.
Metaphor is the only way to come by knowledge. Cognition is akin to recognition.
Without references your world will shrink. With references your world will expand.
Harmony cannot exist without just the right degree of otherness within the whole.
If you pay infinite attention to the now, time stops and eternity appears. That is what we call flow.
Don't look for something. Instead, rest your eyes on the paintings and let become.
Beauty is seeing to the depth, through parts. See the whole.
An unapparent harmony is more powerful than an apparent one.
Harmony is the reconciliation of things that contend with one another.
The essence of beauty is harmony, including its judicious violations.
Truth seems like water, changing form, moving, transforming.
My process is simple but not easy. Improvise, repeat, improvise, repeat, improvise.
Understanding over knowing.