Critique by Robert Mahoney, New York.

"Stray Dogs of Nicaragua" is a series of paintings on un-stretched canvas by Chicago-
based artist Peta Kaplan-Sandzer. In this series, Kaplan-Sandzer captures with
impassioned speed the distinctive character of the stray dogs that roam the towns of
Nicaragua. As a result, Kaplan-Sandzer fixes her gaze on an overlooked aspect of daily
Nicaraguan life and sees only character and resilience, reflective of the people of
Nicaragua. Kaplan-Sandzer's dogs, products of unmanaged breeding, exude a feeling of
stubborn confidence in one's ability to live and survive under harsh circumstances.
In "White dog on green background" Kaplan-Sandzer depicts a white stray dog who has
approached her, perhaps for a hand out. The remarkable eyes of the dog signals that this
animal is not stalking one or making a demand based on brute power, nor is it pathetic or
begging, it has established true eye contact and relates to one in the direct and forthright
manner of a fellow creature trying to get by on planet earth. In another portrait, "Teddy",
Kaplan-Sandzer has slightly altered the leg of the dog so that he looks like he might be
lame, a detail that only draws out further his character as a survivor. In all cases, the
casual interbreeding of the stray dogs has resulted in strangely cocked ears and large
heads, poising these mixed-breeds almost at the edge of wildness. Far from making one
step back from them, the profile of the wild gives each dog a stature and power that
commands respect.

Kaplan-Sandzer is an expressive painter, and each of her portraits of Stray Dogs is done
quickly, working from a charcoal sketch and then enfolding the figure in an abstract field
of brushy paint that, de-contextualizing the dogs from their native townscapes, granting
them further stature as symbols. In the manner of Diebenkorn or Dine, Kaplan uses
paint to describe a boundary around elevated meaning, and to create therein a membrane
where fore- and background merge in a sea of painterly-ness representative of mind. As
such Kaplan-Sandzer's art may be positioned in the post-pop fields generated by Dine
and continued by Deborah Butterfield, Louisa Chase and other "new image" painters in
the 1980s and beyond. Kaplan's sense of color, derived from Milton Avery, also situates
her subjects in the zone of a mood, their monotone intensity ushering animals into our
immediate presence. Likewise, Kaplan-Sandzer's drawing technique echoes on the
directly awkward approach of Alice Neel or Francesco Clemente, staking a claim that
dogs are not pets or objects but creatures with personality and character equal to (and
maybe surpassing) humans.

Peta Kaplan-Sandzer has exhibited her work in Cool Globes, a public art project on climate
change, in Chicago (2007), Fusion '06, a group show in Granada, Nicaragua, and in a
two-person exhibition of images of Nicaragua at the Gallery 57, Chicago (2005), among
others.

Ms Kaplan-Sandzer was born in South Africa and currently lives in Highland Park,
Illinois. As the Co-founder of the Granada Art Project, a Nicaraguan Art Magnet school
organized by the Universidad Santo Tomas, Nicaragua, Ms. Kaplan-Sandzer has also
established partial residence in Nicaragua.