Lisa Sanditz Returns to New York With 'Missing Mountain' at Alexandre Gallery

Lisa Sanditz has opened her first New York exhibition in more than a decade, Missing Mountain, at Alexandre Gallery. The show marks the return of a painter who has spent twenty years asking what happens to landscape once industry finishes with it — and what paint can still do about that.

Place has always been the engine of Sanditz's paintings and drawings. In the winter of 2006–7 she traveled to China specifically to paint the rapid growth of single-industry cities (towns sustained by producing and exporting one category of goods, such as Christmas ornaments, to Western consumers). She found the mirror image at home. A longtime resident of the Hudson Valley, Sanditz knew that this stretch of New York State — once dotted with its own single-industry towns, Tannersville and Gloversville among them — had become a post-industrial outpost for people who want to live within hailing distance of New York City's five boroughs without paying for the privilege. The production of inexpensive consumer goods had left America for Asia, drawn by cheap labor and a willingness to invest in new factories. Her subject was already a two-continent story before she lifted a brush.

What does 'Missing Mountain' actually show?

According to the exhibition's account, Sanditz continues to pursue her understanding of the relationship between human intervention and the landscape, paying particular attention to fitting together different pictorial languages. That postmodern approach — assembling clashing visual vocabularies rather than settling on one — sets her apart from her modernist forebears, from Marsden Hartley to Alex Katz, the lineage of American painters who treated landscape as a unified, personal statement.

It also implicitly acknowledges climate change and what the source calls "greedy, unthinking human intervention." Yet Sanditz, the account notes, "never devolves into proselytizing." The gravitas of the degraded landscape sits alongside something cheerier: her painterly desire to celebrate beauty and what acrylic paint, with its expansive range of artificial colors, can do. There is a certain logic to the medium. A landscape damaged by synthetic industry gets rendered in synthetic pigment, and the paint refuses to apologize for either.

The exhibition includes Missing Mountain (Stewart's Sherbet Sun) (2026), an acrylic on canvas that suggests the register of the new work: a missing geological form, a sherbet-toned sun, a convenience-store palette applied to diminished scenery. Observation, memory and imagination function, per the source, as inseparable components of her thinking and doing — the paintings are neither plein-air reportage nor pure invention, but a negotiation between the two.

Why the decade-long gap matters

A ten-year absence from New York galleries is a long silence in a market that rewards annual output. Sanditz spent it in the Hudson Valley, painting the territory that consumer economics emptied out and refilled. The result, now on view at Alexandre Gallery, is a body of work that treats the American landscape as evidence — of what moved away, what stayed and what paint can still make of the remainder.