Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Inherited Landscape features new oil paintings and watercolors depicting the American landscape as experienced by the artist through found amateur photography from the 1950s and 1960s. For the last 20 years, Greenfield-Sanders’ elegant and beautifully composed paintings have combined photography with watercolor and oil to create artworks that speak about “how memories are approximations, stories that we shape and re-tell.” Often executed with multiple studies, her layered paintings are constructed in a manner similar to the way human memory is built, through repeated reciting of a chosen narrative.
Inherited Landscape features a number of paintings, such as Tree Tunnel and Day Hike, that rely heavily on the play of light on leaves in natural settings, while the artist continues to explore outdoor scenes of bathers, beach combers, and beyond. She writes, “Uniting the disparate images, which came to me from many different sources, was a matter of selecting a palate and achieved primarily in watercolor.” The inclusion of figures grounds these compositions in the human experience, yet the scale of the setting to the figure shifts the emphasis away from human drama and instead highlights the monumentality of the landscape.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders (b. 1978, New York) holds a dual degree in mathematics and visual arts from Brown University. She has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, including a solo museum exhibition in 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Greenfield-Sanders’s work is in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the USA Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; The Estée Lauder Corporation, New York, NY; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She has been the subject of articles in several publications, including Artforum, ARTnews, Artnet Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair.