MILES McENERY GALLERY is delighted to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Isca Greenfield-Sanders. The artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, “The Things I Can’t Forget,” will open on 9 June at 511 West 22nd Street and remain on view through 23 July 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by esteemed writer and critic Phyllis Tuchman.

Greenfield-Sanders’ landscape paintings, with origins in found vintage photography, invite her viewer to forge a connection to their own experience. Using the old pictures as a starting point, she creates several iterations of each image, which she alters with pencil and watercolor, and finally paints over with oil. In her newest body of work, fragments of images have been distilled into carefully composed paintings. They emerge simultaneously familiar yet enigmatic. The exhibition title is a nod to the fabricated nature of working from found images. The artist conveys, “These are not my memories, until they are painted."

In 1916, Virginia Woolf wrote about a peculiarity that runs through all real works of art, “The books of certain writers seem to shape-shift with each reading. The plot might become comfortingly familiar, but the emotional revelations within it change. Scenes once passed over as unimportant begin to prickle with new meaning, as if time itself had been the missing ingredient for understanding them.”

The artist reveals, “All of my paintings are based on amateur slides from seventy years ago. I am interested in the “comfortably familiar” nature of the images and how the elapsed time allows them to “prickle with new meaning” to connect that which was worth capturing with that which is worth painting, at present.” The paintings require a great deal of forethought and groundwork, but still appear unlabored and fresh. Her style of painting, which prizes color, representation and evocation, is activated by both individual experience and collective memory.