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 [...]