"First Day" Painting

Sirje Papp, lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden

A swedish contemporary artist inspired by the Renaissance masters, but also from contemporary photorealist painters as well as photography and film.

Sirje Papp works in a realistic painting tradition and is inspired by the motion of the human body and our states of mind. Light and reflections are an important part of her compositions – without darkness there is no light.

She captures with subtle sensitivity the borderland between dream and reality. Some of her works integrates water and a weightless human body, but there are no feelings of drowning. Instead, the model just floats there in calmness and contemplation together with Papp’s playfulness between light and dark.

Sirje's painting portrays themes around the symbiosis between man and nature but also the existential questions of time, space, life and mortality.

Her fascination with the human body shapes the motifs that provide a wordless story.
A title for the painting is perhaps not necessary but still there rests a calmness, a contemplation in her figures, as if they were caught in a frozen moment.

Papp’s paintings give expression to a suspenseful mystery and can be expressed as magical realism. Through her realistic, evocative and poetic imagery, she wants to achieve
a sense of presence and wonder in the spectator.