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| 312-944-4340 |
Judith Geichman
For Immediate Release
Contact: John Brunetti, Director
312.944.4340
Chance & Serendipity, Stains & Pours
Revitalize Abstract Painting in
Judith Geichman: Soak
October 12 –
a catalog is available, with an essay by Laurie Fendrich
In 1990, Newsweek’s art critic Peter Plagens, in his article “Keeper’s of the Faith,” placed Judith Geichman in the elite small company of artists – John Walker, Karen Carson, Louise Fishman, Moira Dryer -- who renewed the vitality of abstract painting after it “barely survived the ‘80s.” One of
Geichman’s twelve, large-scale (on average six-by-eight-foot) abstract paintings created between 2006 and 2007 display her deft skills in collaborating, and at times battling, with the difficult improvisational technique of staining raw canvas with acrylic washes. Working on the floor of her studio with unorthodox tools such as automobile windshield wipers, trowels and sticks, she is a restless dancer as she pours and puddles her washes of diaphanous pigments, often working both sides of the canvas, in constant search for the perfect moment of randomness that results in a crackling tension between opposites --- lightness and darkness, the macroscopic and the microscopic, tranquility and the convulsive, the veiled and the revealed.
Her atmospheric compositions are indebted to artistic influences such as the modern painters Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, yet are tinged with a postmodern industrial grittiness and the flaking skin of city detritus that speaks to this Columbus, Ohio native’s long love affair with the urban edge of Chicago, which began when she moved to the city in the early 1970s. Her studio wall reflects her insatiable appetite for such seemingly contradictory visual information as crushed and weathered fast food containers, as well as rusted pieces of metal, that are pinned next to reproductions of 17th century landscape paintings. It is as if Geichman is creating her own urban graffiti that implies a tragic romanticism for present and past worlds that uneasily coexist. The resulting canvases are filled with joy and sorrow, beauty, and at times, brutality. If one confuses abstraction with decoration, Geichman’s paintings eliminate any doubt about the difference between the two as she creates edgy poetry that evokes human flaws and vulnerability.
In her catalog essay for the exhibition, artist and writer Laurie Fendrich describes the layered metaphors Geichman achieves in her work, revealing the variety of her influences and the complexity of her achievements: “In Floating World (2004), for example, she imaginatively integrates a wide variety of painterly accidents along with ideas and memories that are important to her. A blue, white and black world floats like a magnificent kingdom inside another more ethereal world. In the artist’s mind, the painting’s swirling structure recalled the current events such as Hurricane Katrina and the Iraqi War, as well as Leonardo’s Deluge drawings. The misty blue atmospheric effects revealed once again the influence of Chinese Scholar’s Rock paintings on her work. And the composition derived from Boucher’s The Four Seasons at the Frick Collection in
Judith Geichman was born in
Alfedena Gallery is located at 434 W.
Tuesday – Friday,
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