Stand in front of Erik Sandgren's four-panel, eight-foot wide landscape Wallula to the Sea at the Maryhill Museum of Art and it's almost as if you're standing on the museum's plaza on the edge of a high cliff, looking out over the grand sweep of the Columbia River Gorge.
Sandgren's quartet of paintings is painterly, with crisp lines and bright acrylic swirls and a pronounced sense of human invention: not so much a photorealist capturing of the landscape as a leap of the artistic imagination into a vivid space inspired by but not dictated by the land.
If ever a museum seemed an inevitable part of its physical space, Maryhill is it. And Sandgren's painting and the other works in the twin temporary exhibitions The Columbia River: Wallula to the Sea and King Salmon: Contemporary Relief Prints speak resoundingly to that sense of place.
Yes, Maryhill has all sorts of works from far-flung places, but the museum's current exhibitions highlight the region's rich cultural heritage, resonating with the landscape and history of the Columbia River Gorge.
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