Beginning with vintage slides, Greenfield-Sanders breaks down photographic images, and rebuilds them as her own. Putting the image through various incarnations, she grids and paints small fragments, reconstituting the “details” to a whole in a manner similar to memory’s construction. The vague familiarity of her anonymous landscapes re-enforces her exploration of remembrance as manifested through a complex working method. The original photographs, by definition, are someone else’s memories, leading the artist to question the nature of recollection and the truthfulness of photography. The medium’s relationship to reality and the role it plays in our own memories become integral to her multiple studies, watercolors and paintings of a single image. The multiple outputs become about repeatedly working with form itself. As the artist stresses: “My work is not personal, the memories are found, and the emotions imbued are universal.” Translating elements from unknown family snapshots into paintings with more universal, contemporary concerns, Greenfield-Sanders adds a complexity to her works belied by the beauty inherent in their aesthetic appearance. [1]
Isca Greenfield-Sanders was born in 1978 in New York City's East Village, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from Brown University in 2000 with a double major in Fine Arts and Mathematics. In 2001 she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. Greenfield-Sanders has had five solo exhibitions with Berggruen Gallery (2005, 2007, 2010, 2014, 2018).
Her work is held in collections including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston; The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Palm Springs Museum, Palm Springs; Estee Lauder Corporation, New York; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hamshire; among others.
[1] Excerpt from “Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Painting the Shifting Sands of Memory,” by Stacey Goergen.
