Friday in the City Part 2: Judy Glantzman at Betty
Cunningham Gallery
My first meeting with Judy Glantzman was when she came to my
MFA program as a visiting artist. She
gave us a cohesive lecture about her work, her practices, her ideas, and
experiences as an artist. Afterwards she
came around to each of our studios and gave us individual critiques. She was brilliant, insightful, kind, and
encouraging. She was making paintings at
the time that were on canvas and on paper, half drawings and half
paintings. The color and mark making was
organically expressionist and packed a punch both in visually and in context. She talked about sitting on the floor, on top
of her canvas or paper, drawing and painting.
She said this helped to be physically as well as
mentally involved in the process. She spoke
of the importance of working into the pieces over and over. She was inspirational and opened doors in my
mind about the ideas of process, of technique, of the artist work ethic, and
when done is done. Coming out of a
Midwestern undergraduate drawing program and sweating my way through an east
coast MFA painting program I felt uniquely connected to her and her work. The thing about Glantzman
is, though, that everyone feels uniquely connected to her work and that
accessibility is why she is such a powerful and relevant artist. I walked in to Betty Cunningham and Glantzman was in the gallery giving a lecture to a group of art students. I walked around the perimeter of the mass of students, and felt too close for comfort for the explosive nature of her new work. At just under 200 pieces the show contains a collection of pen and ink drawings, sculpture, large works on paper, small canvases, and collages. As a direct reaction to Glantzman seeing Picasso’s Guernica for the first time in person, the work reflected the terrible impact of war on a society.
The collages were made through a process of taking multiple pieces
of previously drawn on paper, deconstructing them, and reconstructing into
forms physically bulging out from the wall taking all of the expressive mark
making, paint handling, and ideas, and pushing it out into the viewer’s
personal space. The physicality of the
work was also obvious in the mark making.
There black marks, red marks, flesh colored marks, heavy marks, pressed
marks, light marks, all gestures made from the artist’s entire body being
involved in the creative process.
Along with the collages there was a collection of pen and
ink drawings from Goya’s Los Caprichos series, ink drawings, and a shotgun
blast of small, intimate, and powerful canvases in the back of the
gallery. Not to be forgotten were the
plaster casts of imp faces attached to the wall speckled throughout the
gallery. The quantity of work was as
intimidating as the execution and content.
In the background, I heard Glantzman, a small overwhelmingly
approachable, nice woman, telling a story about a friend of hers that had given
her a hand gun and an AK-47 to draw from.
The work is exploding with loaded imagery, aggressive use of space, and angry,
kinetic energy. It was all made while possessing
the power to create chaos, destruction, or death/holding a gun. All of
this imagery was in similar to her previous body of work but what I had
realized in the moment was that in the past, it had been all safely contained
in the flat, traditional confines of a stretched canvas, mounted paper, or
behind glass in a frame. The current
work is not.
Glantzman has always been interested in the impact of terror
on the human psyche as well as each individual personality’s capacity for
extreme duplicity. The message: We all
have a dark side and it is natural part of being human. The effect on our highly malleable psyche,
from outside sources such as violence in society and/or even from something as
simple as holding a gun, a tool with the sole purpose of destruction, can make
us all capable of anything.
For more: http://www.bettycuninghamgallery.com/current_exhibition.aspx
Image: Judy Glantzman at Betty Cunningham Gallery screenshot
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