Landscape, 1961
oil on canvas
50 x 50 inches; 127 x 127 centimeters
Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present Helen Lundeberg and the Illusory Landscape: Five Decades of Painting. The exhibition opensSaturday, April 24 and continues through Saturday August 30, 2004.
Celebrated Southern California artist Helen Lundeberg once described herself as “too daydreamy, full of romantic notions...never having a young girl’s ambition to get married, have a nice house and children.” So instead of children or houses, she created a luminous assortment of oil paintings; each one a masterful articulation of the evocative powers of Southern California’s richly varied landscapes and the artist’s resolutely elegant eye.
Moving stylistically from her earliest representational works to her revelatory post-surrealist period to the later work in objective abstraction, Lundeberg displays an unerring sensitivity to line, color and form. Waterways become bolts of blue silk ribbon, deliciously unwound, swirling effortlessly into pools of sand. Even her clear-eyed self-portrait is a mesmerizing study in repeated horizon lines threaded with a palette of achingly kindred greens and browns. But whatever the style, subject or palette, Lundeberg continually achieved an authentic visual poetry: tender, specific and organically generated from her feeling for the world around her.
Ms. Lundeberg’s work is included in numerous public and private collections internationally. The gallery represents her estate.