Bob Landström is an artist who primarily works with crushed, pigmented volcanic rock. His abstract paintings, with their highly granulated texture and color combinations only achieved through such a medium, reconsider our relationship with meaning by eliciting the iconography of ancient languages, science, religions, and mysticism.

Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Landström studied fine art by invitation at Carnegie-Mellon University. He later continued his fine art education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. Landström also earned a Bachelor and Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering.

Landström’s work has exhibited extensively and can be found in public, private, and corporate collections around the world. He is the winner of the 1993 SOHO International Competition in New York, the 1994 and 2002 Open Studios National Competition, and other awards. When not in the studio, Landström spends considerable time abroad and has visited archeological sites across the world, which inform his studies and artistic practice.

Landström currently lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Artist Statement

As the main medium of my paintings, crushed volcanic rock, is derived from the core of our planet, my body of work is also an attempt to tap into the core of human experience.

I believe we have more similarities than differences. When we survey human history, specifically through art, it becomes clear that all cultures share a collective understanding of meaning and symbols, what I might even call a collective soul. By using the iconography of ancient languages, religions, science, and mysticism, I hope to not only reconsider how we create meaning but also our relationship with the universal.

My work is fixed in this central principle, in the reservoir that all experiences and realities drink from. I like to think of my work as one of the many estuaries that flows out of this reservoir, asking us to consider where we come from, where we are now, and hopefully break down the boundaries between familiarity and possibility.

Bob Landstrom