Isca Greenfield-Sanders

Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Stone Crop, mixed media acrylic on canvas, 51" x 51", 2026. Isca Greenfield-Sanders (born 1978) is an American artist based in New York City. She is known for vibrant, square-format landscapes depicting outdoor scenes in beach, pool or garden settings, that she reworks from vintage 35mm slides. Critics characterize her art as deceptive in its straightforward presentation and subject matter, contending that it belies a wealth of art-historical references and a sophisticated image-making method which blurs media, digital and manual processes, and the modes of representation and abstraction. Her multi-step process synthesizes the materials, tools and techniques of photography and painting, combining found materials, computer editing, pencil and various paints, and a grid structure. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. She has exhibited at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, de Young Museum, Hamburger Kunsthalle, McNay Art Museum, MFAH, MoMA PS1 and the National Gallery of Prague.

Early life Greenfield-Sanders was born in 1978 in New York City to Karin, a lawyer, and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the photographer-filmmaker. her paternal grandmother was concert pianist and teacher Ruth W. Greenfield, her maternal grandmother was Leider singer Isca Sanders, her maternal grandfather was the first-generation abstract expressionist painter Joop Sanders, and her sister is filmmaker, Liliana Greenfield-Sanders.

The artist earned a BA in mathematics and a BFA in visual arts, both in 2000, from Brown University.

Exhibitions Solo exhibitions of Greenfield-Sanders's art have been held at institutions including MoMA PS1 (2003), Museum Morsbroich (Germany, 2006), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2010) and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2023). She has exhibited at galleries including Goff & Rosenthal and Miles McEnery in New York, Conceptually, Greenfield-Sanders explores the relationship of still images (photographic and painted) to recollection and nostalgia, the presumed truth of photography, and the ephemerality of memory. The authors of Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism summarize these idea, contending that her works "act as a parallel to memory—the original event loses important details in each iteration or 'telling', yet because photographs are perceived as uniquely authentic, the depiction seems unquestionably true." After scanning the vintage slides, she edits them digitally, for example, abstracting or removing figures and elements in order to achieve desired formal or emotional effects.

The small pencil and watercolor studies are enlarged considerably and printed on uniform, square sections of rice paper that she adheres to canvas in tile-like fashion, reforming complete images.

Greenfield-Sanders's fusion of photography and painting produces a sense in the work of wavering between real and unreal, nostalgic and unsettling, and specific and universal; the paintings conveyed a somewhat disturbing, atypical political perspective, with small figures seemingly paralyzed or hung in midair rather than freed by flight. Critic Molly Osberg observed that the artist's prints and paintings "encapsulate the effect of recalling a memory over and over; with time, we gradually forget details, only remembering the strongest colors, lights, shapes, and feelings. This act of repetition and the subtle variation that ensues, makes the artist's practice perfectly aligned with printmaking." Israel Museum Jerusalem, McNay Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Palm Springs Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. —and New York City's Art in the Parks (2016), for a series of large outdoor murals created in collaboration with the Children's Museum of the Arts. In 2001, she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.