Philip Martin Gallery is proud to present, “ Strawberry Sun,” an online exhibition of new paintings and works-on-paper by New York-based artist, Lisa Sanditz. These new works were largely completed outdoors this past summer on Newfoundland's rugged, storm-raked Atlantic coast.
"I try to make the color emerge from the feeling of a place," Lisa Sanditz writes. "Other times it may be more arbitrary, especially if a place is filled with contradictions." The wild shoreline of Canada’s Newfoundland province has long elicited the interest of plein-air painters: in the late 19th and early 20th-century, the Group of Seven and others celebrated the light, texture and atmosphere of Newfoundland's forests, marshes, fields and crashing waves. Today, our experience of this beautiful place is complemented by acknowledging the experience of First Nations, understanding land use and seeing the impact of climate change.
“My work often has a conceptual clarity to it, but this body of work is a lot more open, which speaks to the time we are living in, where things are not clear," Sanditz notes. “Strawberry Sun,” the phenomenon after which her show is titled, refers to the smoky haze in the sky following the wildfires across Canada that blanketed the East Coast this past summer, and a comment made by her son, experiencing that phenomenon for the first time. "For years, the landscape has been a place for me to consider cultural and ecological histories through endless formal discoveries," Sanditz says, "These days, as I paint on site or reinterpret locations back in the studio, every gesture seems to shift from exploration to commemoration and consideration. I bring that visual, narrative, experiential data back to the studio in photos, sketches, and memories. Then I try to make a painting by synthesizing the information and carrying out formal decisions that address the site I am thinking about. The painting builds out of this information, but it also reacts to what's happening visually on the canvas.”
The works Lisa Sanditz made in Newfoundland capture the authority of the individual in the landscape: working quickly, she lays in the scene in front her in hues of vibrant color, each stroke building on the one before it, bringing out harmony and contrast in her representation, be it a hillock, a crashing wave, or a quiet early morning meadow. "Lately, I've been thinking a lot about light, and how to translate that into color — the endurance of light and how profound and timeless it can be in painting. I make a lot of conscious decisions while painting, but then there's also the magic that just happens within the work, in reaction to a shape or a color on the palette, or in response to something I saw. I feel like color combinations are inside of me, and they have to get out. In the studio, I try to make them sync with what I'm working on. Sometimes, certain colors linger in my head for a year or two.”
A recent article by Kasa Patel in the Washington Post cites a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that analyzed changes in style and color in nearly 100 paintings by Claude Monet and JMW Turner, both of whom are known for their impressionistic art and lived during Western Europe’s Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. "The study found that over time, as industrial air pollution increased throughout Turner’s and Monet’s careers, skies in their paintings became hazier, too...Perhaps, some could argue, Turner’s and Monet’s painting style just changed over the decades, giving rise to what we now call impressionistic art. But the researchers also analyzed the contrast and intensity in another 18 paintings from four other impressionist artists (James Whistler, Gustave Caillebotte, Camille Pissarro and Berthe Morisot) in London and Paris. They found the same results: Visibility in the paintings decreased as outside air pollution increased.”
As art historian James Rubin comments in the same article, the embrace of industrialization in Monet's work reflects in some sense Monet’s own readiness to celebrate modernity, which to him signaled change. Lisa Sanditz takes on the perspective of individual and citizen today as a starting point in her own work. Sanditz's expressive brushstrokes and color capture the scene in front of her, involving us as viewers viscerally within that same moment. At the same time, we regard a changing world. Whereas Turner and Monet’s pictorialism is rooted in the picture-making of the 18th and 19th-centuries, Sanditz’s paintings reflect the liberation of brush mark from depiction - a hallmark of Abstract-Expressionism - and an adaptation of that brush mark to the 21st-century. Our time is figured by modern media devices, pre-fabricated canvas and tubed paint. Nature is place away from human presence, and in the era of the Anthropocene, never removed from it.
Lisa Sanditz (b. 1973, St. Louis, MO) received her BA degree from Macalester College (St. Paul, MN) and her MFA from the Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY). In April 2024, Sanditz's work will be the subject of a solo exhibition, "Hyperaccumulators," at Philip Martin Gallery. Sanditz's recent solo and group shows include "Pocket Universe" (Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023); "The Moth & The Thunderclap," Modern Art (London, UK, 2023); “Evergreen," Huxley Parlour Gallery (London, UK, 2023); and "Unnatural Nature: Post-Pop Landscapes,” Acquavella (New York, NY, 2022). Sanditz’s work has recently been featured in solo and group museum exhibitions at Orange County Museum of Art (Costa Mesa, CA); Torrance Art Museum (Torrance, CA); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AK); Cummer Museum of Art (Jacksonville, FL); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO); Nerman Museum (Kansas City, MO); The Pizutti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH); New Britain Museum of Art (New Britain, CT); and Weatherspoon Art Museum (Ontario, Canada). Sanditz’s selected solo and group gallery exhibitions include Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Jonathan Ferrara Gallery (New Orleans, LA); Huxley Parlour Gallery (London, UK); Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); CRG Gallery (New York, NY); ACME Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); Rodolphe Janssen Gallery (Brussels, Belgium); Feight + Volume Gallery (New York, NY); Girls Club Foundation (Fort Lauderdale, FL); Transmitter Gallery (Bushwick, NY); Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston, MA); Pratt Steuben Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); and Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Alberta, Canada). Sanditz is included in major public collections including Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); St. Louis Art Museum (St. Louis, MO); Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, MO); Smithsonian Museum of Art (Washington, D.C.); West Collection (Oaks, PA); Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA); and Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY). Sanditz’s work has been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Artforum, ArtNews, Time Out New York, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, ArtPulse, New American Paintings and Modern Painters. Sanditz lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York.
Lisa Sanditz's exhibition, "Strawberry Sun" is online October 25 - November 8, 2023.
Philip Martin Gallery is open Wednesday - Saturday 11-5 and Tuesdays by appointment. The gallery is located at 3342 Verdugo Road, Los Angeles CA 90065. For additional images or information, please call 323-507-2037, or email info@philipmartingallery.com.
