Spotlight: Isca Greenfield-Sanders

About the artist's work

Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ works blur the boundaries between media art, photography, drawing, watercolour and oil painting. Born in New York City in 1978, she received her degree in Fine Arts and Mathematics from Brown University in 2000.

From a distance, Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ pictures look like re-colored photos of bourgeois family idylls from the 1950s. But the first glance is deceptive: the surface is made of oil paint and the cliché of an idyll which they show has been manipulated – a mixture of document and virtual reality.

Based on slides that the artist subsequently discovered in auctioned metal boxes from a household clearance, Greenfield-Sanders’ artistic transformation process is a highly complex technical procedure. She transfers up to six scans of selected photographs to her computer and then uses digital processing to combine various elements of the images to create modified content. The result is then printed on rice paper in a twofold repeated processing loop and then painted over with oil paint, whereby color changes and densities result in deviations from the original.

In this way, she creates atmospheric images of beach and bathing scenes, ball games and other everyday subjects. On the surface, her works radiate an innocent lightness. However, they subliminally convey profound feelings of nostalgia, forlornness and loneliness. Many of the photo templates represent an idyllic America of the 50s and 60s.

In Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ work, making the artistic process of converting content into form visible and the transformation legible corresponds to the drawing and painting of the first order. What at first sight looks like a realist-painterly virtuosity turns out on closer inspection of her works to be a well-considered engagement with pictorial reality and painting. These are pictorial inventions which respond to the flood of images in the era of new media and at the same time are anchored in the history of painting.