Helen Lundeberg

Over the last few years, midcentury LA painting has moved from the footnotes to the front page in terms of its relevance to current efforts in the field, and Louis Stern has put on some of the best and hippest exhibitions of these rediscovered artists, offering works by Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, and now Helen Lundeberg. Spanning five decades and filled with variously surrealized and abstracted landscapes, the show illustrates how Lundeberg’s paintings evolved from atmospheric symbolism to hard-edge abstraction. Along the way, the artist shed the tropes of the “postsurrealism” for which she was initially known. She rejected the Surrealist strategy of asserting subjectivity through arcane symbolism in favor of a distilled spatial illusionism that seems to posit the vistas of Southern California as a kind of universal psychological terrain. No Jungian decoder ring is required to decipher these limpid spaces; as Dave Hickey comments in the show’s terrific catalogue, “this instinct was to create an inclusive image that existed at a level of generalization which excluded no one.” But accessible as they are, Lundeberg’s paintings, which at first seem friendly, light, and serene, are not necessarily inviting. It’s their uncanny familiarity, in fact, that makes them even more unnerving than the earlier, explicitly Surrealist works from which they derive.