A Daughter Comes Into Her Own
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders ends a four-year New York hiatus with “Pinelawn Pools,” her new exhibition of paintings and small works on paper that opened at Goff + Rosenthal gallery in Chelsea last week.
Depicting a postwar American family at leisure in suburban swimming pools, the new paintings draw on a rich mixture of influences, from David Hockney to Thomas Eakins, and combine photography and painting in what the artist calls “a meditation on palette.”
“My work is a mix of photography and painting,” Ms. Greenfield-Sanders said at the intimate private reception for the show, attended by close family and friends, including photographer Mike Starn; the director of Creative Time, Anne Pasternak, and collectors Ray Learsy and Melva Bucksbaum. “While my earlier work was more photographic, this is the more painted end of the spectrum.”
Recently the subject of a two-person exhibition at the Museum Morsbroich in Germany, along with her father, well known photographer-filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, she sees this new series of paintings as a continuation of her unique approach.
“Working the way that I do, with a technique that combines photography, watercolor, and print to make a large oil painting, I’m still painting from the technique,” she said. “I’m still feeling out the edges of where it’s taking me.”
This technique involves transforming photographic material into oil paintings through an intricate process: She first scans and edits a found image, usually from family albums she finds in flea markets or yard sales, and then prints it onto paper, painting it with watercolor and color pencil. This watercolor is then made into a composite of square tiles that are affixed to the canvas, which is then painted with oil.
The groupings in the new tenebrous paintings, marked by flatness and a pared down use of color, are drawn from an archive of slides Ms. Greenfield-Sanders found on eBay.
“These are very odd images with their own unique perspective — they have a sort of detachment to them,” she explained. “I was attracted to how a lot of the images feel like they are in a forest, and to this palate of browns, greens, and blues.”
The suburban and East Coast tinge of the photographs also served as a point of departure.
“I’d been thinking about David Hockney’s swimming pool paintings, these very stylized and pristine paintings that are very California identified,” Ms. Greenfield-Sanders said. “These paintings are more East Coast in contrast, sloppier and more family oriented.”
Aside from her choice of subject matter, the topic of Ms. Greenfield-Sanders family arises often in discussions of her work.
“It’s hard to be the daughter of an artist,” she said of the criticism that her father’s prominence is key to her success.
“I’m the daughter, granddaughter, niece, and wife of an artist, so no matter how I’m identified, there’s going to be a footnote about my family.”
Ms. Greenfield-Sanders’s grandfather was Abstract Expressionist painter Joop Sanders; her uncle John Sanders is a sculptor, and her husband, Sebastian Blanck, is also a painter.
“My take is that if there weren’t genuine interest in the work, or people who want to hang them in their homes, none of this would be possible,” she said of her career, which already includes several solo shows in Munich, Germany; Turin, Italy; New York, and San Francisco, and numerous group exhibitions worldwide.
That sentiment is true for her earliest and biggest collectors, Melva Bucksbaum and Ray Learsy, whose collection is considered one of the top 200 in the nation, according to ARTnews. Both had ample praise for Ms. Greenfield-Sanders’s new work.
“Her paintings remind me of my mother and my family,” Ms. Bucksbaum, a Whitney trustee, said. She is the namesake of the museum’s Bucksbaum Award, a $100,000 prize given to an artist included in the Whitney Biennial.
“Everyone in the paintings has on these old fashion bathing suits, so there’s this nostalgia for many of us looking at them,” she added. “It’s also the technique, the way she handles photography and paint so well.”
Her partner, Mr. Learsy, who bought one of Ms. Greenfield-Sanders’s first paintings, said he sees in this nostalgia a rich art-historical link.
“When you look at art history, the element of nostalgia is a very forceful and important element in the relationship between the artist and the viewer,” Mr. Learsy said.
“Isca captures that in such a significant way, that even if your own experience doesn’t reach back to wearing those dreadfully designed bathing suits, she’s still able to bring us back to those moments for which we might have nostalgia, but not experience,” he added.
Ms. Greenfield-Sanders’s father agrees.
“There is this constant in her work: a sense of memory, or of time lost or gone by,” Mr. Greenfield-Sanders said, adding that the new paintings were “so simple and yet so dark at the same time.”
“I’m so proud of her,” he added. “I want to be known as Isca’s father.”