NY ARTS MAGAZINE Isca Greenfield-Sanders by JOYCE KOROTKIN Referring more to its content than it does to formalist discourse on the boundaries between painting and photography, Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ recent solo at Lombard-Freid Fine Art is a tour de force in which art and ideology are seamlessly entwined. Her methods – digitally altered, found photographs printed on canvas then worked into with paint – address post-modernist dialogue by blurring the boundaries between processes, causing a certain tension in the work; but her expressive effects within these constructs is what takes precedence. In this arena, Greenfield-Sanders is simply transcendent. Subject matter is taken from generic old photographs, the kind that might comprise a sort of universal family album. These faded images are layered over with sharply delineated color contrasts; jewel tones of turquoise or emerald and the corals and reds that become radiant at dusk. These shimmering colors are translucent, almost hallucinatory, [...]

ARTNEWS Reviews, Isca Greenfield-Sanders International  GALERIE KLÜSER 2 Munich   Isca Greenfield-Sanders’s work is intriguingly deceptive. What seem like snapshots, blown up and painted over, hide a process that addresses issues of family and memory. Looking at these compelling new works, the viewer becomes immersed in someone else’s reminiscence. A family is seen in a glowing halo of nostalgia: a chubby girl in a baby swing, a family get-together, father and son on the lawn. But the black-and-white memories have been gussied up with garish hues that contrast with the 1950s aura. The large-format works were constructed from smaller squares pasted to canvas and assembled like mosaics. The process is laborious: photos are scanned, and, using a computer, the artist isolates particular elements from them to construct her own “remembrance.” This falsified memory is printed on rice paper and colored with pencil and watercolor. Those images are then scanned and printed [...]

ARTNEWS Review, Isca Greenfield-Sanders John Berggruen December 2005 This series of ten large-scale “Beach Detail Paintings” (2005) by New York artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders offered a breath of fresh air. The artist based these works on snapshots of family vacations from the 1950s and ‘60s, taken from slides that she purchased at a yard sale. She scanned the slides, pared them down to a few select details, enlarged the images, and then printed each section on a sheet of rice paper. She then assembled the pages and used oils and watercolor to give the images her own vibrant color, rich texture, and crisp translucence. The artist painted several of the same images in both pink and blue color schemes. Yellow Butt Beach is a study of light at low tide. In the pink version, coral hues are reflected in calm surf as a figure in yellow swim trunks crouches beneath a [...]

TIME OUT NY Art Review, Isca Greenfield-Sanders Goff + Rosenthal These lyrical paintings of the American dream in the summertime are less cavalier than they look. The series began when Isca Greenfield-Sanders purchased a slide archive from the 1960s on eBay last year-scenes of a family lounging at the beach or by a backyard pool. She scanned the slides and re-worked digital prints of the images with watercolor and pencil; she then enlarged those images, affixed them to canvas and painted over them completely to produce works that look like fashionable blurred spots from a lifestyle magazine. In Bright Beach, a family settles in for a day at the seaside, shading themselves under a striped umbrella. Three Boys, a painting of children playing at the edge of the surf is the quintessential picture of a perfect day at the beach. Despite its title, Coney Island doesn’t depict crowds or a carousel; instead, [...]

ARTFORUM  Reviews, Isca Greenfield-Sanders November 2006 GOFF + ROSENTHAL What is striking about Isca Greenfield-Sanders’s “Pinelawn Pools” series (all works 2006) is the sharp juxtaposition, in several of the paintings, of luminous blue swimming pool and dark surrounding shadow. Both are expansive, however self-contained the pool and uncontainable the shade. In Swimming Pool Landscape, the latter threatens to engulf the former, and with it the people around the pool. They’re veritably “living on the edge,” trapped between two pits, as it were, one neatly geometrical, the other abysmal and spreading like a cancer. The picture needs only a pendulum to turn it into something out of Edgar Allan Poe. But of course gloom is not an acknowledged part of American suburban life. Why else move to the periphery except to escape the dreariness and anonymity of a city? Greenfield-Sanders’s paintings are gothic horror tales in disguise: Their secret terror is [...]

THE NEW YORKER  Goings on About Town, Isca Greenfield-Sanders OCTOBER 2, 2006 GALLERIES-CHELSEA If Edward Hopper were a man of the suburbs instead of the city, he might have painted works like these. Greenfield-Sanders emulates the soft, sanded-down look of Hopper's figures and the rigorous compositional architecture, although her vantage points are aerial rather than earthbound. Her works function like back-yard pastorals, peopled with swimmers in pools and loungers in deck chairs looking out over dark, Cheever-esque landscapes. Found photographs serve as source material for these works-a genetic influence, perhaps, since her father is photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Through Oct. 14. (Goff & Rosenthal, 537 W. 23rd st. 212-675-0461.)

ARTNET POOLS OF WONDER by CHARLIE FINCH   My wife and I, children of the ocean in Florida and New Jersey respectively, recently acquired a pool. We found it in relatively rundown condition and had to buy a new filter, which resembles Sputnik, and monitor the PH closely. When we walk up hill and dale, we now check out the neighbors' pools with lascivious curiosity. So, it was with participatory interest that we recently attended a small party at Goff + Rosenthal gallery for Isca Greenfield-Sanders' suite of five new paintings, "Pinelawn Pools." "Pinelawn Pools" is the last in a series of fortuitous memory paintings which Isca began in 1998 when she stumbled upon an abandoned trove of anonymous family pictures from the 1950s at an estate sale. Her subsequent paintings, an alchemy of photography, computer manipulation, watercolor and oil, are simply irresistible, defying interpretation, yet tickling the heart. For [...]

VANITY FAIR Striking Oil, Isca's Talent Runs in the Family by A.M. HOMES | September 2006   She is a young artist with provenance-her father is photographer-filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, her grandfather Abstract Expressionist Joop Sanders. At 27, Isca Greenfield-Sanders has already had exhibitions in Europe, and this fall she has a show opening in New York at Chelsea’s Goff & Rosenthal gallery. Her paintings, based on found photographs of strangers, are syntheses of old-fashioned technique and new-fashioned technical prowess. After each picture is scanned and edited, it becomes a composite of small watercolor “tiles” which evolve into a six-foot oil painting. “I became very attached to the Warholian idea of an image never having a finite end. Using computers and printers, I am able to continue to reproduce a single image, changing scale, medium, and palette-I learn about the image cumulatively,” the artist explains. Her images are pared down to their [...]

ARTNET COMFORT AND JOY by CHARLIE FINCH When I visited Damian Loeb in his Tribeca studio two years ago, I found the artist despondent. His gallery, Mary Boone, which had elevated him to a figure of esthetic controversy, had mysteriously turned against him. Loeb found himself furtively exhibiting his paintings in Europe and tired of the grandiose, cinematic themes in his old work. For solace, Damian began to photograph landscapes in Prague, New York and rural Connecticut and to use these snaps as the basis for a series of small, pastoral paintings. Last week, I found Loeb reinvigorated and content at the opening of his first solo show at Acquavella Galleries’ uptown townhouse. True, Acquavella has regurgitated Damian’s film themes with an elaborate catalogue and poster done up as faux movie advertisements, no doubt an appeal to the Los Angeles collector coven, and Acquavella’s downstairs space is filled with Loeb’s [...]

ARTNEWS Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Goff+Rosenthal by MEREDITH MENDELSOHN | January 2009 In this lively and in ways disturbing show, Isca Greenfield-Sanders fixated on the parachute.  The mostly mixed-media-and-oil paintings, as well as the drawings, were based on World War II and Korean War photographs.  Nevertheless, the artist’s use of bright sumptuous hues was more suggestive of leisure activity than of warfare. These works had the charm of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s aeronautic drawings in Le Petit Prince, a book that Greenfield-Sanders acknowledges as an influence.  But her perspective is more complex.  The figures don’t seem free by flight; rather, they appear paralyzed by it.  In images from the “Orange Parachute” series (2008), for example, a body hangs from ropes like deadweight, and the viewer can sense its heaviness and immobility as it sinks. One of the more intriguing paintings, Gold & Pink Parachute (Gold), 2008 shows a figure under a gold parachute.  Situated [...]

NEW YORK MAGAZINE Entertainment / Artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders Falls to Earth September 15, 2008 Isca Greenfield-Sanders is showing a series of delicious watercolors at Goff + Rosenthal (through October 11) of minuscule figures parachuting through cloudscapes the color of summer and candy. The paintings are apparently based on vintage images of WWII and the Korean War and have the simplicity of form that made Monet’s water lilies timeless.

ARTNET Where's the Ball by CHARLIE FINCH   Now that the great painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders is officially represented by Haunch of Venison Gallery, she is unveiling a new series of irononostalgic paintings with the irrresistible subject of young boys playing soccer, aka "football." So prolific is Isca that she is dividing the new paintings between her first museum show, opening Oct. 16, 2010, at the Denver MCA and a solo show the following week at John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. I journeyed to Isca’ East Village studio to look over the football series the day before they shipped out to points West, and the first thing I said was, "These remind me of Degas’ horse racing paintings." Isca bussed me on the cheek in a grandaughterly fashion and said, "Charlie, that was my biggest influence. People look at these paintings and ask me about the World Cup. I know [...]

HUFFINGTON POST Celebrating Photography's Flaws Through Painting and Drawing By LEANNE GOEBEL | February 2, 2011 Since the advent of photography, visual artists have taken to using photographic images as raw data they then translate from film or digital file to their chosen medium. With the death of film upon us, more and more contemporary artists seem to be exploring what that means. Currently on view in Denver are two such artists: Isca Greenfield-Sanders who translates photographic memories to complexly layered mixed media canvases and Marc Brandenburg who chooses graphite and Fabriano paper to draw images in negative. The result for the viewer is easy access to contemporary visual art via the all familiar photograph, however the more one looks at these works, the more one questions the complexities beneath the surface. Both artists use imagery sourced from current or recent history, but their intentions and results are dramatically different. Isca [...]

MODERN PAINTERS Bio Pic / The Story Behind an Artwork by ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS This is "Light Leak III (Soccer)," 2010, an oil painting based on a photograph from the 1960s. This one came from a 700-slide lot I bought sometime in 2008; I purchase vintage archives on eBay. The soccer images were a thrill to find because I love working in series. Once you see this series of paintings in a room, it’s like, "Okay, these are the soccer paintings." But in fact, the content of the paintings, the subject matter, is not really soccer. It’s really the problems inherent to the medium that the original images were captured in, which is film, and it’s about the process of overlaying or redoing that work as an oil painting. The soccer images suited my interest in figures in motion, and they had the color and the sort of art-historical references that [...]

ART IN PRINT Prix de Print No. 5 / Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Pikes Peak Juried by GILL SAUNDERS Judging a print prize on the basis of anonymous digital images is standard practice, but challenging nonetheless. Deprived of the usual apparatus of supporting information that comes with an attribution, one’s choice becomes much more subjective, grounded only in the appearance of the image and the facts of title, medium, dimensions and edition number. In these circumstances I found myself approaching the role as juror for the Prix de Print feeling somewhat daunted. I wanted to find a print in which the artist had achieved a considered and effective marriage of process and purpose, a print that would repay prolonged and repeated viewing. Several candidates vied for the prize, but this print, Pikes Peak, emerged from a repeated shuffling and short-listing of the applicants, quietly asserting its place in every cut even as [...]

ARTSY Isca Greenfield-Sanders Captures Summer Days and the Beauty of Nostalgia by M. OSBERG | February, 2016 Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ prints and paintings are intended to mimic the fuzzy and often distorted logic of nostalgia. Her works encapsulate the effect of recalling a memory over and over; with time, we gradually forget details, only remembering the strongest colors, lights, shapes, and feelings. This act of repetition and the subtle variation that ensues, makes the artist’s practice perfectly aligned with printmaking. Greenfield-Sanders has crafted a meticulous process to create her works, adding color and light to other people’s memories. Since finishing degrees in math and fine arts over 15 years ago, she has focused her craft on specific form of image-making, which seamlessly melds photography and painting. She begins by collecting other people’s old photographs—often scenes of American leisure from the 1950s and ‘60s—from varied sources like eBay or yard sales. She [...]

GALERIE MAGAZINE Isca Greenfield-Sanders Creates Dreamy, Vintage-Inspired Paintings / The New-York based painter explores the role of memory in this not-to-be-missed Chelsea exhibition by SASKIA RANDLE | June 13, 2017   Moon Beach, 2017. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY This June, visitors to Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe gallery in Chelsea, Manhattan, are confronted with a sea of blues, both literal and figurative, and a strong sense of nostalgia for summers spent by the sea. “Keep Them Still” is an exhibition of striking new works by New York-based artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders, on display through July 1. A collection of watercolor-and-oil paintings depicting blurred, sun-dappled beach scenes and close-ups of abstracted rippled waves fill the rooms. In the first space, two wave paintings—one pink and one blue—hang opposite a pair of zoomed-out coastline paintings from which they were extracted and distilled. An installation view of “Keep Them Still.” Photo: [...]