Postcard, A Conversation with Isca Greenfield-Sanders by LAURI FIRSTENBERG Lauri Firstenberg: What was the impetus for your painting practice in terms of turning to American vintage family photographs as your source for subject matter? Isca Greenfield Sanders: You know, I saw something terribly lyrical in those family snapshots. Instead of simply depicting one family’s vacations they summoned a collective memory. Although I knew some of the character’s names (the slides were labeled) the images weren’t specific. I saw a woman in a wave and it reminded me of Matisse’s Bather of 1909 as much as “Grandma Alice” on Virginia Beach, 1961. Early in 2004, I started making a series of paintings that I loosely call “beach detail paintings”. The ten oil paintings in this show are a continuation of that series. My work up to that point had employed a one-to-one relationship with the original source material, which is to say [...]

How to Save Memory for the Future Remarks on the paintings of Isca Greenfield-Sanders By BERND KLÜSER From a distance, Isca Greenfield-Sanders' paintings look like blow-ups of hand-tinted photographs of bourgeois family idylls dating from the 1950s. That first glance is deceptive: the surface of these works has been done in oils, and the cliché of an idyll which they show has been manipulated – a mixture of document and virtual reality. At a household auction five years ago the artist bought some metal boxes of the kind formerly used to store slides. To her surprise, the boxes were full of holiday and casual photographs of the members of a large American family. Her first reaction was to try and return the photographs to the seller, as she was only interested in the metal boxes. He congratulated her on the purchase of the metal containers and recommended that she throw [...]

Arresting Tranquility A View of the Works by Isca Greenfield-Sanders by SALVATORE LACAGNINA The dialogue between painting and photography was a core component of figurative art in the second half of the 20th century. In particular, if one considers the emblematic and prolific move from pop art to hyper-realism, one can see that the considerations which emerged at that time about the potential of painting and photography still remain an open issue today and thus fertile ground for interesting artistic questioning. From Lichtenstein to Warhol, Morley and Close, the processes of art still involve the reuse of existing images, thus doubling the multi-tiered levels of signification that derive from them. It is precisely through the ostentation of the artificiality inherent in any artistic representation that a considerable portion of contemporary art, whether conceptual or otherwise, has increased its potential for expression. The very nature of art "once removed" is thus [...]

Processes of Identification Isca Greenfield-Sanders by DEMETRIO PAPARONI There was a time when the Cartesian resoluteness of the “cogito ergo sum” was enough to give stability to thought. But when nature and its processes of transformation replaced God, this stability was lost and, together with it, the truths of which rationalism was the bearer were also emptied of meaning. With the consequence that whatever confronts us assumes an identity only by virtue of a process of identification: if we continued to accept the existence of the truth independently from the process of identification, the latter would have no reason to exist, and yet it is at the very basis of our cognition. That is why Romanticism, with its existential restlessness, opening the way to those processes of identification that in time would lead to Cubism and the oneiric dimension of Surrealism, to abstraction and the informal, to conceptualism, right down [...]