ART LECTURE Envisioning the Abstract: Helen Lundeberg and Science
Join us in welcoming Sharrissa Iqbal from the Palm Springs Art Museum for an exciting art talk! This lecture traces the artist’s engagement with themes from the natural sciences in her Post Surrealist and hard-edge paintings. With a particular focus on the recurrence of astronomical subjects in her work, this research highlights Lundeberg’s interdisciplinary interest in scientific and artistic modes of visual communication throughout her career.
All text © Sharrissa Iqbal.
Sharrissa Iqbal is the Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at Palm Springs Art Museum. She specializes in American art with a focus on artistic abstraction in Southern California. She earned her PhD in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine in 2021 and her MA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Iqbal earned a 2019 Huntington Library Dibner Research Fellowship in the History of Science and Technology for her doctoral research on the histories of Southern California abstract artwork and modern physics. She co-curated the exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 at the Palm Springs Art Museum (September 14, 2024 – February 23, 2025).
Helen Lundeberg Throughout a career spanning six decades, Los Angeles-based artist Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) held an enduring fascination with the structures and patterns underpinning the natural world and the universe beyond it. Relying as much on calculated formal composition as on the subjective engagement of the viewer, Lundeberg’s work straddles the permeable borders between observation and memory, perception and imagination, and physical and psychological space.