BARBARA SANDLER’s recent series of eighteen oil paintings on paper, Shooting Stars, finds the artist moving away from the deconstructed male figures of the last several years toward a more unified and decidedly romantic vision of portraiture. Her anonymous, enigmatic subjects – based on collages made from found 19^th and early 20^th century photographs and printed ephemera – reflect her continued interest in the iconography of masculinity (e.g. soldiers, sailors, athletes, etc.).  These painted montages are replete with visual symbols such as targets, numbers and stars, recalling eccentric forebears such as Joseph Cornell, John Graham, George Platt Lynes and Pavel Tchelitchew.

Sandler’s subjects are in part drawn from childhood memories of Memorial Day parades in her Bronx neighborhood and visits to the Hayden Planetarium – the combination, a sensory mix of music, motion and pageantry.  Shooting Stars finds Sandler exploring an increasingly broader palette, with the introduction of vibrant jewel tones, as well as full figure portraits. In the process of layering and painting her subjects, she gives each a distinct personality, even as their true identity remains elusive.  The series explores the placement of objects, or symbols, against the backdrop of a silent image, like an old astrological drawing with its complex network of intersecting lines, or a strange stamp on a passport photo.  Musing on the subject of portraiture, she writes, “I love the confrontational stare of a man stopped in time, looking out from an old photograph… ‘Why should this be the end of me? Give me another go-around, re-invent me!’”

Barbara Sandler’s new work extends a painterly investigation into the expressive power of figuration and portraiture that began in the mid-1970s with large-scale portrait heads of Native Americans, similarly based on found photographs and collages. Since then, her work has continued to explore themes of identity and fragmentation, figuration and abstraction, montage and painting. Shooting Stars is the artist’s third solo exhibition with Pavel Zoubok Gallery.