It was instantly obvious once I walked into Grey Gallery’s spacious, dwelling room-like uptown house that the scale 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.
Judy Ledgerwood, “Alpen Glow” (2025), oil on canvas, 84 × 96 inches (~2.1 × 2.4 m)
I’ve all the time considered Ledgerwood as a consummate painter who reworked the rigidity of Sample and Ornament’s reliance on repetition right into a mode of improvisation and shock. The attention-opener was the way through which 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 shouldn’t be vulgarity, however the frank celebration of feminine sexuality. I’m reminded of one thing the painter David Reed as soon as mentioned to his vendor, Nicholas Wilder: “My ambition in life is to be a bedroom painter.”
“Crepusculo” is a pulsating area of mauve quatrefoils and distorted variations on an orange area. Ledgerwood has painted an orange rectangle whose high and backside edge sags within the center towards the strict edges of her stretched canvas. With rivulets of orange and mauve dripping alongside the underside edge, the irregular rectangle turns into a material, just like the cerulean blue and yellow one we see draped over a turquoise display in Henri Matisse’s “The Pink Studio” (1911). The distinction is that Ledgerwood’s material is product of paint, drips and all. I believe the artist wished to extricate this piece of ornamental material from the harem, an area each non-public and public, to the intimate house of the bed room. Seeing is non-public.
Judy Ledgerwood, “Crepusculo” (2025), oil on canvas, 84 ¼ × 92 inches (2.1 × 2.3 m)
Whereas disegno (drawing), embodied by “Vitamin C,” and colore (colour), embodied by “Crepuscolo,” had been thought of 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 largely triangles in colours similar to pale pink, blue, violet, and orange, in addition to stable traces and stained areas, “Golden Hour” transports completely different strains of American portray, similar to Minimalism’s grid, stain portray, and Sample and Ornament, right into a feminist worldview with out turning 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. Traces of her trefoils meet throughout triangles and grow to be quatrefoils, proving that odd numbers can match into even ones. Some trefoils resemble graffiti penises and balls, whereas others appear like the monochromatic silhouette of a cartoon rodent. Antic humor, joyful irreverence, aesthetic disquisition, and artwork historical past embrace one another.
Ledgerwood attracts lots 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 delivered to thoughts traces from Gertrude Stein’s erotic masterpiece, Tender Buttons (1914): “Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake. Any pink shows that and very likely it is reasonable.” Working inside a restricted vocabulary, Ledgerwood retains discovering methods to open up new doorways to visually sensuous pleasures.
Judy Ledgerwood, “Vitamin C” (2025), oil on canvas, 90 × 144 inches (~2.3 × 3.7 m)
Judy Ledgerwood: Twilight within the Wilderness continues at Grey New York (1018 Madison Avenue, Ground 2, Higher East Facet, Manhattan) by November 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
