Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present a selection of paintings by pioneering Southern California artist Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999). Lundeberg, co-founder of the 1930s Post-Surrealist movement, dedicated the majority of her six-decade career to a geometric abstract style of painting which evoked states of mind, moods, and emotions in the viewer through the calculated formal arrangement of its elements. She pursued the subjective content of her works through dreamlike references to landscape, architecture, and planetary bodies, expressed in various degrees of abstraction.
This selection of Lundeberg’s works, dating from 1970-71, represents an unusual body of highly abstracted compositions by the artist. Web-like forms twist and tunnel through a fantastic, otherworldly space, detached from any decipherable reality while nonetheless alluding to a terrestrial origin to their structures. These mysterious organic networks continuously magnify and telescope between ambiguous orders of magnitude, equally suggesting the yawning mouth of a cave system, the filmy membrane of a dragonfly’s wing, pockets of spongy bone, or a cell caught in the act of mitosis. Through their carefully considered formal structure, Lundeberg’s enigmatic paintings fuse the strange and the familiar to arouse contemplation, curiosity, and a unique emotional experience in the viewer.
Works by Helen Lundeberg are included in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and numerous other public and private collections.
Louis Stern Fine Arts is the exclusive representative of the Estate of Helen Lundeberg.