Among the assembled 58 paintings, most of the dozen that date from the 1930s to the end of World War II are captivating — exceedingly strange, not in flashy or dramatic ways but as murmuring enigmas. Take "The Red Planet" (1934). Inside a small room, a black-and-white photograph of a comet shooting through the night sky is propped up on astronomy books stacked on the floor. The books are next to a pedestal table with an odd, sky-blue circular top. The composition is primarily a Constructivist-style arrangement of flat planes of color — floor, wall, baseboard, door, tabletop, books. Two glowing orbs of vivid color draw your eye. The smaller orb is crimson, a thickly painted dot whose bottom edge is rimmed with a violet shadow. It appears to rest on the table below the larger orb — golden, like the sun, and hovering above in space. It only takes a moment to realize that the golden sphere is actually the knob on a pale-green door behind the table, opened to an unseen exterior. Lundeberg breathes miraculous space into the tightly organized picture through the deft deployment of shadows. Initially they don't seem to line up in a logical way. The big one cast on the rear wall by the door suggests light flooding in from the side, but it seems at cross-purposes with the angled shadows cast by the table legs below and the stacked books opposite. Shadows push away from one another, opening up the relatively contained interior space of carefully balanced colors. The light source for these subtle visual pyrotechnics is initially puzzling — but not for long. The shadows radiate outward. The light source is the sunny doorknob. The bright glow of this common household "sun" casts deep shadows, including that violet arc beneath the "red planet" dot on the table. The doorknob, a conventional bit of domestic hardware, becomes a mysterious symbol of imaginative liberation — a metaphor for opening a door between interior and exterior worlds. Lundeberg transforms an ordinary small room into a virtual solar system. Microcosm meets macrocosm — as another of her paintings is titled — and the membrane between them blurs. (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-knight-helen-lundeberg-review-20160406-column.html)