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.
Evergreen responds to a world in which the global and the individual are inextricably linked through networks of production and e-commerce, social media channels and an endless news cycle. The exhibition sees sprawling scenes of tragicomic global events set against a number of semi- autobiographical, domestic motifs: a beached container ship looms forebodingly next to a late night trip to an overflowing refrigerator, while the same brooding, stormy palette is used to describe both an erupting volcano and the affirmations of self-worth (“happy birthday, stay fabulous”) emblazoned on a slowly deflating helium balloon.
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 title of the exhibition, Evergreen, holds a duality of meaning for Sanditz. Leafy canopies, perpetual youth and abundance giving way to more insidious connotations of cyclical recurrence - desired or not. Lisa Sanditz’ America is one whose traditions and self-image bely a toxicity that continually resurfaces politically, socially and ecologically.
Lisa Sanditz has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as a fellowship from the San Francisco Art Institute and the Reed Foundation Grant. Her work has been published extensively, including in New American Painting and she was selected for inclusion in Landscape Painting Now (2019) edited by Tom Bradway. Sanditz’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas, the Columbus Art Museum, Ohio and the Smithsonian Museum of Art, Washington D.C., among others.
