Judy Pfaff: Busting pictures to hell
Judy Pfaff, Quartet One, 2018; Photographic inspired digital image, wire frame, acrylic, melted plastic, aluminum discs, fungus, paper, glitter, Styrofoam, fluorescent light, drawing in artist’s frame; 120.75 x 156 x 32 inches.jpg
Contributed by Jason Andrew
De Kooning once said, “Every so often a painter has to destroy painting.” Cezanne did it. Picasso did it. Then there was Pollock. As de Kooning put it, he “busted our idea of a picture to hell.” And after him came Judy Pfaff. Ever since her three-wall breakout show in the backroom of Artists Space in 1974, she has been at odds with the stringent attitudes and moral fervor that burdened postwar painting. In a suite of four new wall-sized works at Miles McEnery Gallery, Pfaff draws inspiration from a lifelong interest in the natural and the spiritual realms.
Straight out of Al Held’s classroom at Yale, Pfaff took a sculptural approach to painting. Strong color, bold three-dimensional accents, and a strong impulse towards architecture have been the currents driving her art. “I’m at war with conventions,” Pfaff said in an interview with Irving Sandler in 1982. Because her work escapes definition, her eclectic, freewheeling gestalt has been mistaken for artistic gesture linked to the Abstract Expressionists. But the visual opulence of her work is more appropriately described as a kind of global orchestration of ideas.
I’ve always thought that she was at her best when she fully embraced her unbridled effervescence and cast aside the conventional limits of an exhibition space (and the marketplace, for that matter), as she did in first installation of hers that I saw at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1997. When it’s uncanvassed and unbound, her work conveys a risk-courting adventurousness that is all the more compelling because it edges toward the ephemeral – like performance and indeed life itself. This disposition cuts sharply against the “objectness” of painting.
