Judy Glantzman
Dressing for the Carnival
September 9 – October 17, 2015
Reception: Wednesday, September 9th, 6 -8:00 PM
“The work started when I saw Winslow Homer’s Dressing for the Carnival in the exhibition, The Civil War, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting drew me in. I made pen drawings, mapping relationships, rather than pictorially recreating the painting. I found deep layers of complexity: formal, racial, American relationships.”
Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to open its 2015-2016 season with the work of New York based artist, Judy Glantzman. The solo exhibition, titled after the Winslow Homer painting, Dressing for the Carnival, runs from September 9 through October 17, 2015. It will be Glantzman’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Wednesday, September 9th, 6 – 8 PM.
The exhibition includes approximately fifty small paintings (ranging in size of 6 x 6 inches to 10 x 10 inches), six folded large drawings on paper and two gridded collages. In the small paintings, Glantzman sources images from Homer’s painting as well as from portraits by Jacques-Louis David or stock photos of TV personalities such as Columbo (TV detective), or simply head shots of people on the street. She paints the same portrait repeatedly, finding that each painting revealed a new personality. She refers to these small canvases as “the actors” as they take on her voice. The six folded drawings are done over several months, each drawing a square portion of the whole, often worked on while she commuted to her teaching job. She paints or draws every image that captures her eye, layering images upon images, month after month, resulting in a visual record of time. She refers to these folded drawings as “the calendar.” The two larger collages are, for Glantzman, “the Grand Stage.” In these, she pulls from the small paintings and the images from folded drawings as if all were her vocabulary, joining together to complete the opera.
Judy Glantzman graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. She began exhibiting in the early 1980’s in the East Village art scene, at Civilian Warfare and Gracie Mansion. She followed with shows at BlumHelman and Hirschl & Adler Modern in the 1990’s and at Betty Cuningham Gallery for the past decade years. She had a 30 year retrospective at Dactyl Foundation in spring 2009.
The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Art Museum, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; The Progressive Collection, Cleveland, OH; and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, most notably the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 2001; the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Grant, 1997; the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, 1994; and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, 1992. Glantzman lives and works in New York, NY.
A CONVERSATION: JUDY GLANTZMAN by New American Paintings
May 15, 2013, 8:30 am
Filed under: Interview | Tags: A Conversation, Arthur Pena, Judy Glantzman
To know Judy, a wonderful and generous artist and teacher, one has to reconcile her kind spirit with her absolutely gruesome work. Body parts, heads (so many heads!) and objects of destruction are rife throughout her recent solo show at Betty Cunningham Gallery. Glantzman’s raw imagery, what Peter Plagens of the Wall Street Journal called “studenty” (a term Glantzman enjoys) is tough to deal with. Addressing her personal relationship to the idea of war while pulling from the works of Goya and Picasso, Glantzman “orchestrated” over 200 pieces for the viewer to work through, a feat for both sides. After mounting her show and while commuting between Providence and New York, Glantzman and I had a conversation. - Arthur Peña, Dallas Contributor
I love it when established artists start something new. After seeing Pablo Picasso's Guernica for the first time three years ago, Judy Glantzman began moving away from the introspective self-portraits she had been making for many years toward a less self-engaged exploration of the devastation caused by war. Determined that she was done with psychological self examination, Glantzman set out to develop a new, more outward-looking visual language. Here are images of a sprawling, roughly hung exhibition at Betty Cuningham in which Glantzman presents powerful work from her ongoing series.
