Lisa Sanditz
12 Nov - 23 Dec 2009
LISA SANDITZ
"Underwear City"
November 12 - December 23, 2009
Lisa Sanditz’ second solo exhibition at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen is the culmination of her interest and travels in recent years that have resulted in a new body of work inspired by the Chinese commercial landscape.
For the last ten years, Sanditz' paintings have focused on the various forms in which the marketplace and wilderness intersect, overlap, and inform each other. Subjects in her paintings have included such things as sporting events, shopping malls, residential development and tourist destinations. Through a complexity of combined forms, unconventional approaches clashing with more historically-anchored painting techniques, Sanditz has described the brash and metastasizing flux of the American landscape.
Through her continued investigation of these places came an awareness of multinational corporations and sprawling urban and exurban areas not just in America, but also all over the world. With a growing interest in the broader notion of the American landscape, it became clear that all the familiar commodities that we buy on a daily basis, everything from toothbrushes to cars, have their roots in distant and unfamiliar places.
In the winter of 2006-2007 Sanditz traveled to single-industry towns in China; places whose industry is focused on the production of specific and often singular products. These places, located largely in China's Pearl River Delta have been unofficially renamed by the items they produce: Sock City (Yiwu), Shoe City (Jinjiang), Oil Painting Village (Shenzhen) among many others. These burgeoning micro-economies dedicated to producing fantastic amounts of a single commercial product for export have dramatically transformed the Chinese landscape; furiously shifting the pastoral to the industrial. Sanditz describes these places in her signature amalgam of fancifully ornate and pictorially bound marks; forming seemingly endless seas of product showrooms, factories, and neon signs that emerge from the murky smog saturated backgrounds of her canvas.
For Sanditz this body of work evidences not a cultural divide but rather a convergence of two cultures economically. Perhaps not a symbiosis, but an awareness of how intrinsically linked and mutually impacting each has been and continues to be.
The paintings for the show in Brussels are a continuation of the serie called Socks City shown at CRG Gallery, New York in late 2008. They were made in the last year after returning to China, which was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Lisa Sanditz returned to China in January 2009 for a three week tour of more single industry cities in China, such as Underwear City, Lamp City, Tangerine Town, as well as seeing tourist destinations such as the Ice Lantern Festival in Northern China. Production was still booming in China, though as a result of the world economic crisis, growth was slower there, and land and buildings that were overbuilt and spacious before, now felt empty and abandon.
"Underwear City"
November 12 - December 23, 2009
Lisa Sanditz’ second solo exhibition at Galerie Rodolphe Janssen is the culmination of her interest and travels in recent years that have resulted in a new body of work inspired by the Chinese commercial landscape.
For the last ten years, Sanditz' paintings have focused on the various forms in which the marketplace and wilderness intersect, overlap, and inform each other. Subjects in her paintings have included such things as sporting events, shopping malls, residential development and tourist destinations. Through a complexity of combined forms, unconventional approaches clashing with more historically-anchored painting techniques, Sanditz has described the brash and metastasizing flux of the American landscape.
Through her continued investigation of these places came an awareness of multinational corporations and sprawling urban and exurban areas not just in America, but also all over the world. With a growing interest in the broader notion of the American landscape, it became clear that all the familiar commodities that we buy on a daily basis, everything from toothbrushes to cars, have their roots in distant and unfamiliar places.
In the winter of 2006-2007 Sanditz traveled to single-industry towns in China; places whose industry is focused on the production of specific and often singular products. These places, located largely in China's Pearl River Delta have been unofficially renamed by the items they produce: Sock City (Yiwu), Shoe City (Jinjiang), Oil Painting Village (Shenzhen) among many others. These burgeoning micro-economies dedicated to producing fantastic amounts of a single commercial product for export have dramatically transformed the Chinese landscape; furiously shifting the pastoral to the industrial. Sanditz describes these places in her signature amalgam of fancifully ornate and pictorially bound marks; forming seemingly endless seas of product showrooms, factories, and neon signs that emerge from the murky smog saturated backgrounds of her canvas.
For Sanditz this body of work evidences not a cultural divide but rather a convergence of two cultures economically. Perhaps not a symbiosis, but an awareness of how intrinsically linked and mutually impacting each has been and continues to be.
The paintings for the show in Brussels are a continuation of the serie called Socks City shown at CRG Gallery, New York in late 2008. They were made in the last year after returning to China, which was funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship. Lisa Sanditz returned to China in January 2009 for a three week tour of more single industry cities in China, such as Underwear City, Lamp City, Tangerine Town, as well as seeing tourist destinations such as the Ice Lantern Festival in Northern China. Production was still booming in China, though as a result of the world economic crisis, growth was slower there, and land and buildings that were overbuilt and spacious before, now felt empty and abandon.