Isca Greenfield-Sanders: [WG.79] All Roads In My Mind

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.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders technique is a complex process that she elaborated early in her career and consistently worked with since then. She transforms a photo slide into an oil painting and in the reproduction both of the media are challenged, the original as well as the copy of the original, to refer to Walter Benjamin’s book “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936). Also the memory of an experience is questioned; does a photograph portray the true story of an experience or does our memory? With time our memory fade and can you really tell if you remember the moment or do you simply remember the captured image of that moment? Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ artworks give the impression of a collective memory and the feeling that we also have experienced what she depicts, even though it is setting out in another country and another era. This makes her paintings both universal and timeless.