![]() ![]() When Lundeberg’s uniform fields are ruptured it’s with beguiling effect: punctuated by three-dimensional still lifes, as in two versions of the same arrangement called “The Mirror and Pink Shell.” The earlier painting, from 1952, appears to fuzz, its brushwork legible, while the later version, started in the same year but not completed until 1969, stiffens into focus, its fields smoothed and amplified. Made between 19, the selection here focuses on bands of vertical color, soft tones dialed up or down the spectrum to achieve an enigmatic interplay of shadow, flatness and depth - an uncanny sense of spatial perception that collides classicism with the illogical dimensions of de Chirico, his empty arcades shot through with Los Angeles’s sepia-smog light. But Lundeberg’s feel for space wasn’t entirely rigid, leaving room for Surrealism’s psycho-geography to haunt its corners. ![]() muralist in Southern California: hard-lined geometric abstraction rendered in plush color delineating domestic zones. ![]() ![]() By contrast, the 10 bracing canvases here share more with the strain of work Lundeberg created contemporaneously as a W.P.A. In the 1930s the Angeleno modernist Helen Lundeberg advanced a style referred to as Post-Surrealism, an American splinter movement meant to temper the European version’s weirder imagery (but not by much one of her early efforts includes a wrench plucking a wilted nail out of a crimson pool). ![]()
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