Closed
10.3 – 22.4 2023
Lisa Sanditz:Evergreen
3–5 Swallow St
Lisa Sanditz:Evergreen
10.03 – 22.04.2023
Closed
Hours
Monday to Saturday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow St
London
W1B 4DE
Lisa Sanditz. Evergreen (2022)
Huxley-Parlour are delighted to announce their second solo presentation by Lisa Sanditz. Titled Evergreen, in reference to the monumental container ship that became wedged in the Suez Canal for six days in 2021, Sanditz’ exhibition explores the intersection of consumerism, nationalism and the natural world.
Comprising eleven new canvases, the exhibition examines contemporary American life, balancing despair and a quietly controlled rage with wry humour and absurdism. Moving freely between genres, from art historically informed landscape to narrative tableaux, Sanditz employs her own brand of mercurial allegory to chronicle the political, cultural and ecological state of America today. Scenes range from a tar-black Mar-a-Lago coastline to an oversized pink tiger reclining across a neatly mown suburban lawn. In Sanditz’ paintings lawns, palm trees, suburban development, Bengal tigers and ex-Presidents all jostle for space in worlds in which they do not quite belong.
Sanditz’ exhibition highlights a feedback loop between the banal and the absurd, depicting the continual shifts between the two in her work. In doing so, the artist questions the foundational tenets of American mythology. Through her critical depictions of the American landscape and evocative tableaux, Sanditz questions the tradition of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism in an era of global climate crises and hyper-capitalization. Purposefully dismantling long held Romantic notions, Sanditz’ work reveals the ways in which the marketplace and the wilderness intersect and overlap.
THE EXHIBITION
10
The Works
7
Lisa Sanditz
Evergreen
2022
Oil on canvas
Lisa Sanditz
Tiger
2022
Oil on canvas
Lisa Sanditz
Volcano
2022
Oil on canvas
Lisa Sanditz
Kaaterskill Falls
2022
Oil on canvas
Lisa Sanditz
Tivoli Bay
2022
Oil on canvas
Lisa Sanditz
Sugar Bear (Bear Eating Skittles)
2022
Oil on canvas
Lisa Sanditz
Happy Birthday Stay Fabulous
2022
Oil on canvas
B. United States1973
Biography
Lisa Sanditz’s pulsating, vibrantly coloured landscapes capture the intersection between the natural world and the built environment and its effect on food production, consumption, ecology and the economy. Her works are rooted in a fascination of how we organize ourselves in a commercial world and how we value and commodify the landscape. This interest in the commercialised landscape has seen Sanditz focus on farming in America’s Midwest, junk food factories in Arizona and car manufacturing in Detroit.
Alongside oil painting and ceramic work, Sanditz has also used plastics and industrial paint, such as that used to spray-paint cars, which she builds up in layers on the canvas, before sanding the surface to reveal the layers of paint, aiming to reflect the embedded nature of man-made products within our landscapes. Throughout her work, colour has remained of constant importance and she uses it in multi-faceted ways within her landscapes. Above all, colour is used as a destabilising force in her painting, in which she re-configures the canvas into a series of breaks and ruptures and streaks of colour, while simultaneously using it to delineate the boundaries between foreground and background and to unify the composition.
Lisa Sanditz was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1973. In 1994, Sanditz received her BA degree from Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota, later graduating with an MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2001. In 2008, Sanditz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which allowed her to expand on her interest in depicting the built environment. Sanditz’ work has been exhibited internationally in the United States, Italy, China and Belgium and is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas and the Columbus Art Museum, Ohio. In 2019 Sanditz was included in the publication Landscape Painting Now, edited by Tom Bradway. Sanditz has also worked as the visiting artist at SUNY Purchase, the University of New Orleans and Rhode Island School of Design.
She lives and works in New York.