It was instantly obvious once I walked into Grey Gallery’s spacious, residing room-like uptown house that the size of the 4 work in Judy Ledgerwood’s exhibition had been decided by these of the partitions on which they hung. A single work occupied two of the partitions, whereas two equally sized canvases held a dialogue on the third.
Ledgerwood’s manipulation of formal construction inside particular person works accelerated my appreciation of her play with dimensions, from the skewed linear grid of unequal triangles occupied by a hand-drawn trefoil in “Vitamin C” (all works 2025) to the colourful opticality of various trefoils, a few of them mirrored, dispersed throughout a monochromatic floor in “Crepuscolo.” Held on reverse partitions, this pairing made me look extra carefully at how every of the 4 work talked to one another in addition to held their very own floor.
I’ve all the time considered Ledgerwood as a consummate painter who remodeled the rigidity of Sample and Ornament’s reliance on repetition right into a mode of improvisation and shock. The attention-opener was the style wherein she undid the motion’s decorous decorum into one thing fanciful, forthright, and albeit vulgar. This goes again to Willem de Kooning’s ostentatious nudes and their hint of misogyny, which Ledgerwood additionally upends. The quatrefoils and trefoils we see in her work are comical evocations of feminine genitalia, a nasty boy’s graffiti on a rest room wall. I as soon as in contrast them to “Henri Matisse’s cut-outs […] romanced by anthropomorphic cartoon mice.” And but, what we see isn’t vulgarity, however the frank celebration of feminine sexuality. I’m reminded of one thing the painter David Reed as soon as mentioned to his seller, Nicholas Wilder: “My ambition in life is to be a bed room painter.”
“Crepusculo” is a pulsating discipline of mauve quatrefoils and distorted variations on an orange discipline. Ledgerwood has painted an orange rectangle whose high and backside edge sags within the center in opposition to the strict edges of her stretched canvas. With rivulets of orange and mauve dripping alongside the underside edge, the irregular rectangle turns into a fabric, just like the cerulean blue and yellow one we see draped over a turquoise display screen in Henri Matisse’s “The Pink Studio” (1911). The distinction is that Ledgerwood’s fabric is manufactured from paint, drips and all. I believe the artist wished to extricate this piece of ornamental cloth from the harem, an area each personal and public, to the intimate house of the bed room. Seeing is personal.
Whereas disegno (drawing), embodied by “Vitamin C,” and colore (colour), embodied by “Crepuscolo,” had been thought-about rival aesthetic approaches in Renaissance Italy, Ledgerwood complicates the matter with the pairing of the identically sized rectangles “Alpen Glow” and “Golden Hour” on the identical wall. Fabricated from a loopy quilt of principally triangles in colours resembling pale pink, blue, violet, and orange, in addition to stable strains and stained areas, “Golden Hour” transports totally different strains of American portray, resembling Minimalism’s grid, stain portray, and Sample and Ornament, right into a feminist worldview with out changing into didactic. Some triangles are aligned in order that they flip between flat shapes and two sides of a pyramid — that’s, two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality. Strains of her trefoils meet throughout triangles and turn into quatrefoils, proving that odd numbers can match into even ones. Some trefoils resemble graffiti penises and balls, whereas others appear to be the monochromatic silhouette of a cartoon rodent. Antic humor, joyful irreverence, aesthetic disquisition, and artwork historical past embrace one another.
Ledgerwood attracts most of the trefoils in a line of thick paint, as within the saturated colours of “Alpen Glow.” Some drip. Within the open house the place two meet, we see a thick twist of paint whose evocative ambiguity dropped at thoughts strains from Gertrude Stein’s erotic masterpiece, Tender Buttons (1914): “Gentle blue and the identical purple with purple makes a change. It reveals that there is no such thing as a mistake. Any pink reveals that and really seemingly it’s affordable.” Working inside a restricted vocabulary, Ledgerwood retains discovering methods to open up new doorways to visually sensuous pleasures.
Judy Ledgerwood: Twilight within the Wilderness continues at Grey New York (1018 Madison Avenue, Flooring 2, Higher East Aspect, Manhattan) by way of November 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
