!["Cloud Shadows," 1966, Helen Lundeberg. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Gene Ogami. Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts. ©The Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation.](https://getty-pst.imgix.net/gtc_pst2024_GP_LSFA0002.jpg?q=80&auto=format%2Ccompress)
Throughout a career spanning six decades, Los Angeles-based artist Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) held an enduring fascination with the structures and patterns underpinning the natural world and the universe beyond it. From her early scientific illustrations of flowers, seeds, and human embryos to the highly abstracted mountains, planets, and waterways she painted in her later career, Lundeberg’s work traces a unifying structural organization across terrestrial and cosmic orders of magnitude. In delicate pencil sketches and canvases swept with passages of flat color, Lundeberg investigates visual and functional interconnectedness amongst seemingly disparate organisms and natural phenomena, as well as the cycles of life, death, and reproduction that recur across time and space. Relying as much on calculated formal composition as on the subjective engagement of the viewer, Lundeberg’s work straddles the permeable borders between observation and memory, perception and imagination, and physical and psychological space.
"Cloud Shadows," 1966, Helen Lundeberg. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Gene Ogami. Courtesy of Louis Stern Fine Arts. ©The Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation.