In addition to the planet series, the Louis Stern exhibition includes several landscapes from later in the artist’s career which have significant visual similarities to the Planet series. Like her planets, the landscapes are constructed from sharply delineated bands of unmodulated color in a subtle range of hues. They do not represent direct observation of a specific location but are imagined landscapes composed to convey a sense of place with the least possible means. As in her earlier work, Lundeberg’s later paintings represent a clear artistic vision that seeks to create a shared perceptual experience with her viewer. Her artwork distills the accumulated views a lifetime of careful observations, analysis, and study into condensed abstract images with a universal appeal. Perhaps this is why, nearly fifty years later, her Planet paintings and late landscapes do not feel dated or locked in the decade of their creation, but feel fresh and contemporary to viewers today.
One of the so-called California hard-edged painters, along with her husband Lorser Feitelson, Helen Lundeberg (1908-99) made coolly expressive, enigmatic and in the end highly geometric paintings, bridging the Surrealists of the 1930s and 40s and the Minimalists of the 70s and 80s. This exhibition shows one of her abiding interests throughout the decades was astronomy, reflecting the way that the discovery of new galaxies, the space race and the moon landing captured the 20th-century imagination.
ArtForum names Helen Lundeberg: Inner/Outer Space a must-see exhibition!