Named a “Must See” exhibition by Artforum, Helen Lundeberg: Enigma of Reality opened September 17 at Louis Stern Fine Arts, West Hollywood and is on view through December 3, 2022.
This well-received solo exhibition is comprised of early figurative and “mood-entity” Post-Surrealist works created between the 1930s and 1950s. These paintings follow early post-surrealism and precede the hard-edge abstract paintings that dominated Lundeberg’s career from the 1950s. Though more painterly than Lundeberg’s hard-edge works, their resonance has similar effects: they are evocative, mysterious, and otherworldly. Many of the paintings are intimate in scale and subject matter in contrast to the works she was simultaneously creating for the WPA’s Federal Art Project; the exhibition includes portraits of her mother and her sister, minute haunting landscapes, interiors, and carefully orchestrated still lifes in the Post-Surrealist tradition, which Lundeberg founded with Lorser Feitelson. Despite the formulaic nature of her “idea-entity” Post-Surrealist works as outlined in Lundeberg’s manifesto, the Post Surrealist paintings in this exhibition create a mood, address personal subject matter: “the recurrent cycles of birth, life, and death, the permeable borders between psychological and physical space, and the ambiguities of perception and reality.”*
Helen Lundeberg: Enigma of Reality is on view at Louis Stern Fine Arts, September 17 to December 3, 2022.
*Read full press release on the gallery’s website at
https://www.louissternfinearts.com/exhibitions/helen-lundeberg-enigma-of-reality/press- release
Installation images of the exhibition can be viewed here:
https://www.louissternfinearts.com/exhibitions/helen-lundeberg-enigma-of- reality/installations
Louis Stern Fine Arts
9002 Melrose Avenue
West Hollywood, CA
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10am to 6pm, and Saturdays, 11am-5pm
Laura Boles Faw, researcher + archivist
October 21, 2020