Lisa Sanditz | Review

The American painter Lisa Sanditz has a load on her mind. She seems concerned about the environment, about the US’s current political climate and, first and foremost, about bringing up her young son in the midst of it all. But you don’t need to share her worries to enjoy the paintings here in this show, Big Boy. Sanditz (b.1973), it’s fair to say, is an artist who leaps from style to style within the confines of a single canvas. A work such as Big Cat, for instance, might evoke everything from 19th-century French symbolist painting to Peter Doig or even Quentin Blake’s illustrations for Roald Dahl. Similarly, Big Boy/Big Gulp sees a picturesque Upstate New York valley rendered in a patchwork of registers which somehow cohere to give a seemingly three-dimensional impression of gradient. Depressingly or amusingly, depending on your mood, the scene is dominated by a gigantic figure slouching across the landscape and slurping from a large, takeaway fizzy drink cup.

May 10, 2025