West Coast (Los Angeles) painter Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) turned to abstraction in the 1950’s after having spent the two previous decades working in social realist and post-surrealist styles of imagemaking. Her precise compositions with their restricted palettes hovered between abstraction and figuration, but always remained rooted in reality, referring  to still lifes, landscapes, planetary forms and architecture.

“I was interested both in the pattern and the three-dimensional illusion created by these very flat geometric forms. At first I confined myself to angles and straight lines. Then I got a little tired of that and began getting some curves.” -Helen Lundeberg

Helen Lundeberg’s paintings have been exhibited widely in prominent museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art at Utah State University and the National Museum of American Art in Washington D.C. Her work was most recently included in the J. Paul Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970, and in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition titled In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States.–wikipedia