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Artist: Lisa Sanditz

ALEXANDRE presents Missing Mountain, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Lisa Sanditz. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York in over a decade.

Sanditz has spent more than two decades making landscape painting with a palette that runs hot and synthetic, closer to Kool-Aid, while maintaining an active dialogue with the paintings of the Hudson River School. Working from drawings, photographs, and notations gathered on site, Sanditz paints compositions where scale, gravity, and distance refuse to settle: a horizon tips, a figure turns sideways, a single flower looms larger than the hills behind it. She lives and works in the Hudson Valley, where much of the material for this exhibition was gathered, and the region’s terrain has long been less a backdrop to her practice than its subject and its source.

Many of the paintings in Missing Mountain take their subject from a single vanished view: the Catskill Mountains, erased from the horizon by wildfire smoke. In the summer of 2023, heading north through the Hudson Valley on a clear, bright day, Sanditz looked west toward the Catskills and found that the mountains were not there. There are ordinary reasons a view disappears—snow, fog, rain, nightfall—but this was none of them. Smoke from the Canadian wildfires had followed the trade winds into the East Coast skies for the first time, and the air was dense enough with particulates to erase a mountain range. The temporary disappearance of such a monolithic geological feature was destabilizing.

At the center of the exhibition is a group of landscape paintings that return to the same view under different conditions of visibility. Shifting color, pattern, and saturation to partially obscure the scene, Sanditz draws each painting’s palette and mood from a specific way of seeing, whether that be pollutant haze, dazzling night skies, summer heat, an eclipsed sun, or snow.

Other works in the exhibition explore the missing, the ephemeral, and the unexpected by different routes. Big Foot (2026) sets a colossal teenage foot at the ocean’s edge; Debris Flow (2026) considers the tangled relationship between forest fires, mudslides, and California dreaming, and Wild Violets (2026) follows a raucous group of women hunting for wild violets during the flowers’ brief spring appearance.

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by the critic Barry Schwabsky, who describes Sanditz’s method as one of “hyperaccumulation,” in which colors, marks, stories, and places are improvised into a single, slightly off-kilter view. As he writes, “It’s a challenge and that’s why it’s exhilarating.”

Lisa Sanditz (b. 1973, St. Louis, MO) received her BA from Macalester College, St. Paul, MN, and her MFA from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. For more than two decades, her vividly keyed landscapes have tracked the intersection of the natural world and the built environment, and its consequences for ecology, consumption, and the economy. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2015), and her work was included in Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism (D.A.P., 2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles; Huxley-Parlour, London; and a solo presentation with ALEXANDRE at Independent, New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. She lives and works in New York’s Hudson Valley.

all images © the gallery and the artist(s)