During its thirtieth anniversary season, Bellas Artes will present its eighth solo exhibition of works by Judy Pfaff, an artist whom the gallery has represented for the past twenty years. Pfaff started her career as a painter, yet her work evolved into large sculptural installations which pioneered the beginning of installation art. She also is well known for her complex dimensional drawings, prints, and wall constructions. Her influence resonates through the work of many young artists today.
The body of work that the artist will be showing at the gallery draws on her expansive curiosity about the world around her, as well as her extensive knowledge and masterful use of materials. Pfaff’s work has always been a response to the environment in which she lives and pursues her art. During the time she spent in New York City, images from signage and structures such as bridges and buildings found their way into her work. These were expressed using vivid colors and geometric forms. When she began working and living in the Hudson River Valley of upstate New York, she found sanctuary in and inspiration from the natural world. The flow of water along the river, the rhythms of the seasons, and the cycles of plant life became a focus. As she began restoring a Victorian mansion, her images were animated by elements such as pressed tin ornaments and chandeliers of that era. But the natural world outside her window prevailed. Recently she has created a large studio complex and vast network of gardens in Tivoli, New York, where her work has become more organic than geometric. Her use of color also is more in tune with nature—subtle, muted, and ethereal. Like the hue draining from a dying flower, sometimes color becomes almost transcendent.
Pfaff’s work has always been characterized by complex relationships, visceral immediacy, and perpetual motion. By inventively combining the natural and the man made, while paying attention to current events, she evokes the chaos, order, and dangerous beauty inherent in our world. Her imaginative process of laminating the physical with the psychological permits her to create complicated, spontaneous choreographies, revealing what poet Jorie Graham refers to as “understory shadows.” After the BP Oil Spill, the depth of the darkness was symbolically released as a black resin bubbled up through the images.
Judy Pfaff: Twenty Years at Bellas Artes will present three-dimensional drawings and wall constructions. These complex, gestural, and multi-layered works will be like small installations, fusing the beauty of the earth and natural materials with an awareness of the forces and power of nature—and of man. These works will continue Pfaff’s imaginative explorations of materials and spontaneous development of new techniques and visual vocabularies to magnify and share her thought-provoking, visceral, and insightful vision of the complexity of living in our world.
The artist was born in London, but moved to the US as a child. She received her BFA from Washington University in 1971 and MFA from Yale in 1973. In 1975 she was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial. She exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and represented the United States at the Sao Paolo Bienal in 1998. She has had more than 100 solo exhibitions and participated in more than 200 group shows. In 2004, Pfaff was named a MacArthur Fellow and in 2009, received the United States Artists Award. She also has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation.
Today her work may be found in many collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Art.
