Talk

MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by Lisa Sanditz.

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 commercialized 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’s 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. 

Talks is a series of lectures by artists, writers and scholars presented by MFA Fine Arts. Talks are held on Tuesdays at 3:00pm at 133 West 21st Street in Room 101C and on Zoom. Participation in the Q&A is limited to MFA Fine Arts students attending the lecture in person.

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