Lisa Sanditz: Big Boy
24th April, 2025 – 31st May, 2025
Huxley-Parlour
3–5 Swallow Street
London
W1B 4DE
Huxley-Parlour will present Big Boy, its third solo exhibition of works by the American painter Lisa Sanditz, opening this April at the gallery’s Swallow Street space. The exhibition features ten new canvases that explore the uneasy interplay of family dynamics, shifting generational roles and human impact on the natural world, all viewed through Sanditz’s distinctive lens of exaggerated scale and vibrant painterly language.
In Big Boy, figures are inflated or reduced to disarming effect. At times tender, at others ominous, the works dwell in a world where size is narrative, where children loom over hillsides and cats tower like deities. These distortions speak not only to childhood’s elastic sense of proportion but also to broader cultural anxieties—environmental instability, political polarisation and the tension between control and chaos.
Image of courtesy of Huxley-Parlour
A reclining boy, rendered in bold reds and deep blues, drinks from an oversized cup while sprawled across a vast, overshadowed landscape. In another work, a small figure offers food to a much larger cat whose gaze is at once affectionate and aloof. In a striking underwater composition, a giant adolescent floats among coral, holding hands with a smaller maternal figure—an intimate gesture set against a dreamlike, inky blue sea.
Though fantastical in appearance, these imagined scenes are anchored in painterly tradition. Sanditz draws from historical uses of scale to imply perspective or status, repurposing those techniques to question power and proximity in contemporary life. Her figures do not sit comfortably in their environments; rather, they press against them, highlighting the strained relationship between human presence and ecological fragility.
Personal experience runs beneath these works. As a parent, Sanditz reflects on the shifting tides of authority between generations. At the same time, her canvases echo wider social and political transitions in American life, with images that suggest a nation caught between nostalgia and uncertainty, past structures and future change.
In Sonrise, a face appears from murky water beneath a blood-red moon, evoking myth and rebirth in equal measure. Pinus Erectus offers a cheeky take on adolescence, featuring cartoonishly erect evergreens that mirror the awkward passage from childhood into adolescence. Elsewhere, wide, open landscapes contrast with the densely packed forms of youth and growth, suggesting a push and pull between freedom and containment.
Sanditz’s energetic brushwork and saturated colours imbue her canvases with urgency. Planes of colour meet with expressive gesture, the paintings thrumming with the unsettled energy of the present moment—neither fully dystopian nor quite hopeful, but alert to the fragility of both people and place.
Image of courtesy of Huxley-Parlour
Born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1973, Sanditz studied at Macalester College and later completed her MFA at the Pratt Institute in New York. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008, she has exhibited internationally, with her work included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Her work was featured in the 2019 publication Landscape Painting Now. She lives and works in Tivoli, New York.
With Big Boy, Sanditz invites viewers to enter a world where scale distorts certainty, where tenderness and tension coexist, and where our place in the landscape—both literal and metaphorical—is ever shifting.
Lisa Sanditz: Big Boy opens on the of 24th of April, 2025 until the 31st of May, 2025 at Huxley-Parlour
©2025 Huxley-Parlour
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