Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Cut from a Dream, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by New York-based painter Isca Greenfield-Sanders. This show marks Greenfield-Sanders’ seventh solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from May 1 through June 19, 2025. The gallery will host a reception for the exhibition on Thursday, May 1 from 5 to 7 PM.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ idyllic landscape paintings and works on paper depict fleeting moments of found and collected memories. Greenfield-Sanders' serene compositions take viewers through outdoor scenes of aerial beachscapes, lake coastlines, and open fields of wildflowers. While the artist typically works from 35-millimeter vintage slides from the 1950s–1960s, Cut From A Dream draws, for the first time, not only on found images but also on personal photography.
Greenfield-Sanders shifts between representational and surreal chromatic choices in her work. In Red Wildflowers, 2025, the bright reds and greens of uncut flowers contrast against a cool blue sky, creating depth and movement; one can almost feel the quality of air as it moves through the patch of grass rustling the wildflowers. In Pink Lake, 2024 the deliberate use of Opera Pink as an overriding hue transforms a naturalistic scene into something surreal, tinted rosily like a holiday memory from childhood. The interplay between natural and stylized elements works to create atmospheric landscapes that feel both familiar and dreamlike–often punctuated by far off-figures just out of view.
Exploring themes of collective memory, nostalgia, and the documentation of experience, Greenfield-Sanders probes the nature of recollections as images are translated into various mediums. Beginning by gridding each photograph, she creates several studies in colored pencil and watercolor, which she then collages and paints over in oil. Through this additive process of layering opaque and transparent paints, hidden elements of the composition reveal themselves the longer one spends with the painting; reflecting in form how memories, like concealed layers, emerge, shift, and are re-shaped over time.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders (b. 1978, New York) holds a dual degree in mathematics and visual arts from Brown University. She has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, including a solo museum exhibition in 2010 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Greenfield-Sanders’s work is in the collection of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the USA Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; The Estée Lauder Corporation, New York, NY; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She has been the subject of articles in several publications, including Artforum, ARTnews, Artnet Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair.
Isca Greenfield-Sanders: Cut From a Dream on view May 1 – June 19, 2025. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and preview available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery by phone at (415) 781-4629 or by email at info@berggruen.com.
