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Seven years after her death, Helen Lundeberg was paid an extraordinary homage. The legendary band Sonic Youth dedicated a song to her on their 2006 album Rather Ripped in which they listed all the titles of the paintings in the exhibition Helen Lundeberg and the Illusory Landscape, which was shown posthumously at the Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in Los Angeles. This was not by chance. Sonic Youth, whose album covers are adorned with works by Gerhard Richter and the West Coast artists Mike Kelley and Raymond Pettibon, is also an established name in the U.S. art scene. With their song, they immortalize a pioneer of 1960s Hard-edge painting. Lundeberg, whose works were also represented in the major survey show Pacific Standard Time, had a strong impact on West Coast painting. Born in Chicago in 1908, she moved with her family to Pasadena, where she attended art school. At the art college, she met her later husband Lorser Feitelson, with whom she studied. In the mid-1930s, they jointly founded Subjective Classicism, which was strongly influenced by Surrealism, Renaissance painting, and artists such as Giorgio de Chirico. While in the 1940s Lundeberg created dreamlike paintings in which she combines figures or objects with geometrically reduced spatial elements, at the end of the 1950s her painting approached pure abstraction. "My work has been concerned ... with the effort to embody, and to evoke states of mind, moods and emotions," says Lundeberg. She distilled pure surfaces, glowing colors, and pure forms from her former lyrical interiors and landscapes. Lundeberg became one of the most important protagonists of a Californian kind of abstract art that was inspired more by Malevich, Mondrian, and Albers than by the New York School Abstract Expressionism that was taking the world by storm at the time. And unlike her male contemporaries such as de Kooning and Pollock, Lundeberg never made an international breakthrough.
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