Judy Glantzman at Betty Cuningham Gallery
by CATHY QUINLAN
September 4 to October 11, 2008
541 West 25 Street,
between 10 and 11 Avenues
New York City,
212 242 2772
Judy Glantzman Maiden Voyage 2008, oil on canvas, 40 x 42 inches
Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery
Cover SEPTEMBER 2008 shows a detail of this image
In the first years this decade, Judy Glantzman’s paintings were of the single figure, painted and repainted: female, with multiple personalities and isolated in space.
Suddenly, in 2004, there was a population explosion. It was as if these women had given birth to hundreds of disembodied heads. Or else, Glantzman had looked up to find herself on the subway where anyone not immersed in a newspaper or a novel studies everyone else’s facial expressions. Her method of painting also changed radically. Instead of painting and repainting the entire piece, wet-on-wet, every day, the paintings became an accumulative series of sketched heads and there was a desparate attempt to organize them—as totem poles, mandalas, crosses, etc. The viewer’s gaze moved quickly, paralleling the speed of the drawing, as if searching for someone (and not finding him). They could also be read as watching the play of fleeting expressions on a single face.
In this latest series, another deep change has occurred. Vestiges of the stacked and circled heads remain, but they are often enclosed in a larger figure and a physical space is loosely suggested. Glantzman is using a greater variety of organizing tactics and approaching narrative space. She also singles out specific faces and other details for our longer contemplation.
Drawing and painting alternate in an extremely fluid and unusual way in these works. Has a painter ever been compared to Aretha Franklin, the way she can be talking one moment and singing the next?
Summer Song (all 2008) is a crowd scene wittily placed in what seems to be a formal drawing room. This is an entire sketchbook compressed into a single painting. One might question the use of a framing line and some ripples that suggest that this is a drawing of another drawing-- was it necessary to confuse the space even further? But it is perhaps by thwarting the desire of the viewer for a coherent sense of space that Glantzman leads us to study a succession of details and what might seem clumsy or confusing when seen as a whole becomes fascinating and beautiful when read as a sequence in time. For this viewer, Summer Song starts with a man who seems to be measuring the space with his thumb…and then the rest of the painting unfolded.
Judy Glantzman Bathesda 2008, oil on canvas, 38 x 38 inches
Courtesy Betty Cuningham Gallery
In Maiden Voyage, a large figure contains a Medusa raft of heads, while the drawing of these heads also beautifully suggests waves. There is a fixed point –the head of the larger figure. Her expression is enigmatic, maybe a dry-eyed contemplation of the future. Does she stand (oh she has four feet) on fish? These paintings are slippery, full of allusions and both contain and inspire free association. A baby’s head doesn’t look like a baby any more on closer inspection but only seemed to because a pair of very large hands rest on its shoulders and a single face turns out to be, maybe, three faces.
Another painting, Bathsheba, confirmed one of this reviewer’s speculations—that Rembrandt has been lurking around Glantzman’e entire body of work. The earlier female figures that might be self-portaits began this thought and the crowd scenes continued it. A legend about Rembrandt mentions that he “dissuaded visitors from looking too closely at his paintings”. The pleasure here is to be found the other way around completely—in looking very closely indeed.
