Isca Greenfield-Sanders Publication 2026 by Miles McEnery Gallery

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS

511 West 22nd Street

515 West 22nd Street

525 West 22nd Street

520 West 21st Street

New York NY 10011

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS: THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS Bridget Quinn Isca Greenfield-Sanders’s new body of work, exhibited in “The Language of Flowers,” draws on the same rigorous technique she has developed over decades: transforming photographs that she crops, enlarges, adjusts for color and light, translates into watercolor studies, then forges into finished square-format paintings. The paintings sometimes include figures, other times not, but they always retain some glimpse of the grid that formed them. Her new series of floral landscapes, though, while familiar, represents a distinct departure — one that is both beautiful and perilous. That departure is partly one of technique. Rather than utilizing found photographs as sources, Greenfield-Sanders uses photos she took herself, and while her earlier paintings were in oil, the new series is in acrylic. The risk, though, is not one of technique but rather of subject matter: The exhibition features landscapes dominated by flowers, both in cultivated gardens and blooming in the wild. How can flowers, in and of themselves, represent any kind of peril? Bright red blossoms with accents of violet and gold beneath a canopy of trees, as in Poppies and Lilies (2026), or the tangled wild blooms against the sky of Hardheads (2026): What could be lovelier or more traditionally pleasurable? That may indeed be the case for the viewer; maybe it even should be. But for any artist who is also a woman, all flowers have thorns. As to the danger of gardens, ask Eve. In Western culture, flowers are too often relegated to the decorative, and are regarded — consciously or unconsciously — as the hallmark of a specific type: that is, some version of the lady artist in her drawing room. This is hardly by accident. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential eighteenth-century treatise, Émile, or On Education, the philosopher wrote that girls should be taught to draw “leaves, fruit, flowers, draperies, anything that will make an elegant trimming for the accessories of the toilette,

and enable the girl to design her own embroidery if she cannot find a pattern to her taste; that will be quite enough.” Flowers are “quite enough” for girls who will become women, because philosophers and many others deem them all to be merely decorative. So it’s a double risk for an artist who is also a woman to take on flowers as her subject. But it is also sometimes essential. While Greenfield-Sanders’s earlier paintings tended toward seascapes, bathers, and the vistas of holiday hikes, all conveying an air of personal and collective nostalgia, her new focus proffers something that is the near opposite of nostalgia: a sweetness that also conveys a sense of apprehension. Unlike the sea or mountains, flowers are with us a very short time. There’s a reason why flowers, as much as skulls, are used as memento mori. Flowers as objects may be frivolous, but as symbols they can be deathly serious.

This is not to imply that Greenfield-Sanders’s landscapes are part of some old-fashioned or outdated tradition. What could be more of our time, and more needed, than looking again at the natural world? While depictions of flowers may invite some nostalgia for earlier art and times, a painting like Queen of the Meadow (2026) engenders a different kind of wistfulness. It is not art for a different era, but art for a different epoch of the earth. Rousseau’s age kicked off an aesthetic of the sublime, with its sense of the terror and beauty born out of the awesome power of nature. In our age, the roles have shifted. We have become a danger to nature, and nature, in response, has become more dangerous to us. The sense of memento mori embodied by Greenfield-Sanders’s flowers includes not just the fragility of human life, per artistic tradition, but of the natural world itself. Can paradise survive us? Painting may be a place to secure some of its survival, because art has always been one of the great bulwarks against the ravages of time. In Greenfield-Sanders’s landscapes, I’m reminded of the almost Egyptian-like calm of Georges Seurat, translating something of middle class leisure — gardens, hikes — into the eternal: still, beautiful, and sometimes a little terrifying in their timelessness. Of course, many artists and eras inevitably come to mind. In her previous work, Greenfield-Sanders’s paintings have suggested to me, and others, the works of artists ranging from Masaccio to Milton

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Self-Portrait as Half Nude with Amber Necklace I, 1906, Oil on cardboard, 24 1/2 x 19 inches (62.2 x 48.2 cm). Private Collection.

Avery. But when viewing the paintings exhibited in “The Language of Flowers,” I can’t help but think of Rachel Ruysch and Clara Peeters, Mary Delany and Georgia O’Keeffe, that is, women whose art often centered around flowers and whose choice of subject matter influenced their reputations. Think of Georgia O’Keeffe, forever swatting away the vulvar obsessions associated with her monumental flower portraits, as well as the longstanding rankings of academic art that put still lifes at the bottom of the hierarchy of genres — and surely put floral still lifes by women artists at the very bottom of that particular genre. Choosing to paint flowers will always be a courageous choice for women who are aware of this history. In addition to her artistic foremothers, Greenfield-Sanders has notable family influences. Her grandfather was the Dutch and American abstract expressionist painter Joop Sanders, who had Delft tiles in his home — small, square, painted landscapes (and sometimes figures) laid out in grids — that Greenfield-Sanders remembers fondly from her childhood and that surely have some echo in her own work. Her father, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, is an artist, a filmmaker, and a photographer who gave his daughter her first camera. Photographs are, in a sense, part of her DNA. They are essential to her process as a painter, and they provide, quite literally, the underpinning of her art. As an aside (or is it?), the list of women artists with artist fathers is significant and long, ranging from Artemisia Gentileschi to Élisabeth Vigée Lebrun, from Rosa Bonheur to Kiki Smith and Kara Walker, among many others. I’ll include just one more: Frida Kahlo, whose father, Guillermo, was a professional photographer.

Clara Peeters, Table, 1611, Oil on panel, 20 1/2 x 28 3/4 inches (52 x 73 cm). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain.

Edvard Munch, Cabbage Field, 1915, Oil on canvas, 26 3/4 x 35 1/2 inches (68 x 90.5 cm). MUNCH, Oslo, Norway.

In self-portraits, Kahlo often painted herself with flowers in her hair, and she was often photographed similarly. Flowers are traditionally utilized in portraits of women to convey beauty, freshness, and purity, but they hold other meanings when women wield them for themselves. Paula ModersohnBecker depicted herself holding flowers many times, but nowhere is this more telling than in Self-Portrait as Half Nude with Amber Necklace I (1906), where in her hair and in each hand are small pink buds that echo the shape and color of her nipples and areolae. As an artist, she is like nature itself, fecund, procreative, and generative. Similarly, Ana Mendieta’s haunting depiction of her body as a kind of grave of flowers, Imágen de Yágul (1973), from her Silueta series, embodies a total unification of artist and earth. And then, of course, there’s Clara Peeters, painter of the Dutch Golden Age, who created some of its earliest, and greatest, floral still lifes. She sometimes inserted her own nearly hidden self-portrait as a ghostly presence within the work, as in Table (1611). As for Greenfield-Sanders’s own landscapes, the artist says, “Flowers are a portrait of time.” I’m reminded of something the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard noted in his book So Much Longing in So Little Space, about a landscape by Edvard Munch that moved him. Cabbage Field (1915) depicts six rows of vertiginously receding blue-green cruciferous vegetables hemmed on both sides by golden crops of another kind. Knausgaard says of the apparently prosaic rural scene, “I see death.” I laughed the first time I read that — cabbages equal death? — but thought of it again when I looked at Greenfield-Sanders’s Red Salvia (2026). Like Munch’s cabbages, her green here (and elsewhere)

contains blue, which is restful for the eye and emotions even while there is restive movement — hers upward with the red salvia into sky. If flowers in their fleeting transience are ideal symbols of our impermanence, then surely white daisies and red salvia, with their attendant art historical associations of purity and sacrifice, should remind me of death just as Munch’s cabbages reminded Knausgaard. But, I don’t see it. What I see and feel is a portrait of time: this moment and the artist’s attention to it, a rigorous and lovely fixing of the timebound into timelessness, the blooming in the doom, and the beauty of it all. Bridget Quinn is a writer, art historian, and critic. She’s the author of three books, including the award-winning Broad Strokes and, most recently, Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry & Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard.

Hardheads, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Innisfree, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Peonies, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Poppies, 2026

Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Poppies and Lilies, 2026

Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Poppy, 2026

Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Queen of the Meadow, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Stonecrop, 2026

Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Tulips, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 51 x 51 inches 130 x 130 cm

Forest Flowers, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 17 x 17 inches 43 x 43 cm

Hardheads, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 17 x 17 inches 43 x 43 cm

Innisfree, 2026 Mixed media acrylic on canvas 17 x 17 inches 43 x 43 cm

Maine, 2026