The Enigmatic Beauty of Painting: A conversation with Isca Greenfield-Sanders

"On the occasion of her new exhibition Shade My Eyes, I spoke to Isca Greenfield-Sanders about her newest body of work which will be on view at Miles McEnery Gallery from 21 May until 11 July 2020. The delicately balanced paintings depict scenes that feel reminiscent of childhood memory. They are distant yet quietly composed, serene and tranquil. We spoke together about her process and upbringing for eazel magazine." 

Featuring works by gallery artists Inka Essenhigh, April Gornik, Amy Bennett, and Isca Greenfield-Sanders, new book Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism presents a global survey of landscape painting in the 21st century. Including work by more than 80 outstanding artists, the book highlights the thriving genre of landscape painting in the contemporary world, while also reflecting upon its origins.

Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present:

Isca Greenfield-Sanders: INHERITED LANDSCAPE

18 OCTOBER - 21 NOVEMBER 2018

An opening reception will be held on Thursday 18 October, 5 – 7pm

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.

Isca is our seventh subject in a new SLICE Special Guest Series which introduces our readers to extraordinary, creative people ⎯ wherever we may find them.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders is an artist based in New York City. Her large scale mixed media oil paintings are found in the public collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); Victoria and Albert Museum (London); and Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Isca’s solo exhibitions include Haunch of Venison, New York and London; John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; Galerie Klüser, Munich; and Baldwin Gallery, Aspen. Her upcoming solo show will be at Ameringer Mcenery Yohe, New York in 2017. Isca has been featured in a wide range of publications, including Artsy, Art in Print, Modern Painters, Huffington Post, Artnet Magazine, ARTnews, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, ARTFORUM, and Time Out New York. She graduated from Brown University with a double major in fine arts and mathematics. In 2001 Isca was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. When she’s not working, you can find her with her husband, the painter Sebastian Blanck, and their two sons. Isca lives and works in New York City’s East Village.

by Danielle Tcholakian

SOHO — Vesuvio Playground will double as an art gallery for the month of October, featuring a mural project by downtown-based artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders — and the help of more than 200 local kids.

The installation, entitled "Playground Parachutes," includes four large-scale murals that Greenfield-Sanders gridded into 72 square tiles printed in four basic colors: blue, pink, yellow and black.

Teaching artists at the Children's Music of the Arts (CMA) in Hudson Square took the tiles and helped more than 200 children fill them in with colored pencils, before returning them to Greenfield-Sanders so she could reassemble into four parachute images.

Green Below 14 and SmartSpaces present Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ Playground Parachutes, in partnership with the Children’s Museum of the Arts (“CMA”) and NYC Parks, opening at 10:30 a.m. on October 1, 2016 at Vesuvio Playground in SoHo (corner of Spring and Thompson Streets).

The New York-based artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders transforms old slides by scanning and gridding them, and then applying multiple layers of watercolor, colored pencil, or oil paint. The resulting painting blends photographic and painted elements to reimagine scenes of beach vacations or Nantucket outings. With fuzzy figures and muddled blues, her painted imagery evokes a nostalgic air that tugs at the viewer’s memory and perception. Balance Point will be Greenfield-Sanders first solo show at Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.

Presented by the New York Academy of Art, “WATER|BODIES” is co-curated by artist Eric Fischl and Academy President David Kratz. Generously sponsored by Cadogan Tate, “WATER|BODIES” presents paintings, photographs and sculptures by established and emerging artists with connections to both the East End and the New York Academy of Art. Life on the South Fork of Long Island is based on and intrinsically connected to the water, and this show explores water, bodies and the inevitable meeting of the two. The works in this exhibition depict the sea, the shore, the pool, sunbathers and the nude as a lively and expressive genre that interweaves themes of natural beauty and the nature of pleasure.

Over 30 artists are featured in the show, with works from newly minted Academy MFAs hanging alongside pieces by artists such as Ross Bleckner, Patrick Demarchelier, Eric Fischl, Ralph Gibson, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, April Gornik, Michael Halsband, Enoc Perez, and David Salle.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders has with her oil paintings spellbound a large audience in the US. Her paintings in the exhibition All Roads in My Mind depict scenes that most of us are familiar with: a boat trip or a summer day on the beach, and you can almost feel the wind in your hair, touch the sand and feel the warmth of the sun on your skin. Isca Greenfield-Sanders utilizes private photo slides found on eBay and from the chosen photographs she arranges parts and details into her work. The people she portraits are anonymous to her but also to the viewer by the way they are depicted, often from a distance and without any distinct characters. Her use of color and at times abstract fields in her paintings bring to mind painters like Claude Monet, Winslow Homer as well as the Swedish artist Carl Fredrik Hill.