Isca Greenfield-Sanders

“Paintings for Harley”

Baldwin Gallery, 2005

New York artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders presents “Paintings for Harley”, a new series of oil paintings and mixed-media watercolors that create a dialogue between painting and photography. Continuing her method of appropriating imagery from anonymous, discarded family snapshots, the artist explores memory and experience, in a tribute to the late Harley Baldwin.

Inspired by two photos selected from her vast pictorial archives, she chooses incidental figures from the compositions’ backgrounds, rather than investigating the primary subjects. In the past, Greenfield-Sanders sutured together elements from several different compositions, engineering fictional scenes. Her new approach is nearly the opposite: mining one image for all of its inherent possibilities. Strangers walking along the beach represent a universal anonymity. Previously, the artist used the signature colors of photography, with saturated red, green and black hues. Now, she employs delicate pinks, yellows, and other mid-tones, shifting to a more painterly palette.

Greenfield-Sanders earned BA degrees in Visual Art and Mathematics from Brown University in 2000, and in 2001 she was a visiting artist at the American Academy of Rome. Solo shows of her paintings have been held in Turin, Munich, San Francisco, Aspen and Long Island City, and her work is in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection. Her art has appeared on the pages of numerous publications, including Art News, Tema Celeste, the New York Post, and the New York Arts Magazine.