Isca Greenfield-Sanders at Wetterling Gallery

Isca Greenfield-Sanders has with her oil paintings spellbound a large audience in the US. Her paintings in the exhibition All Roads in My Mind depict scenes that most of us are familiar with: a boat trip or a summer day on the beach, and you can almost feel the wind in your hair, touch the sand and feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. Isca Greenfield-Sanders utilizes private photo slides found on eBay and from the chosen photographs she arranges parts and details into her work. The people she portraits are anonymous to her but also to the viewer by the way they are depicted, often from a distance and without any distinct characters. Her use of color and at times abstract fields in her paintings bring to mind painters like Claude Monet, Winslow Homer as well as the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders technique is a complex process that she elaborated early in her career and consistently worked with since then. She transforms a photo slide into an oil painting and in the reproduction both of the media are challenged, the original as well as the copy of the original, to refer to Walter Benjamin’s book “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Also the memory of an experience is questioned; does a photograph portray the true story of an experience or does our memory? With time our memory fade and can you really tell if you remember the moment or do you simply remember the captured image of that moment? Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ artworks give the impression of a collective memory and the feeling that we also have experienced what she depicts, even though it is setting out in another country and another era. This makes her paintings both universal and timeless.

A unique fusion of photography and painting, Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ work creates a rich dialogue between abstraction and figuration, mechanical reproduction and handcraft, and narration and formalist visuality. Appropriating images from anonymous family estates, Greenfield-Sanders fashions meditative narratives exploring themes of nostalgia, memory and collective ideals. Her use of digital media, combined with the traditional craft of oil painting, creates a set of paradoxes mirroring contemporary lives and longings in an increasingly mechanized world.

Born in 1978, New York, NY, Greenfield-Sanders received BA degrees from Brown University in Visual Arts and Mathematics. In 2001, she was the Visiting Artist at the American Academy of Rome and has since received numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. In October 2010 her fist solo museum show opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Her work can be found in the public and corporate collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, and The Estee Lauder Corporation, New York, NY. Greenfield-Sanders lives and works in New York, NY. Wetterling Gallery will present a solo exhibition with Isca Greenfield-Sanders in January, 2016.

http://www.wetterlinggallery.com/exhibitions/all-roads-my-mind