Judy Glantzman at BlumHelman - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Eleanor Heartney

Back in the heyday of the East Village, Judy Glantzman's ubiquitous work provided simultaneous attacks on the integrity of the body and the painted canvas. Cutting crudely drawn figures from their masonite grounds, she scrambled and reassembled flashes of bright pink flesh to create 3-D works which stood out for their explosive energy. In this, her first solo show in New York City in seven years, the energy remained, but Glantzman returned to more traditional means.

These works are all oil paintings on canvas which represent one or more figures against simple, colorful grounds. Built up of layers of tangled lines, broad swaths of color and fields of drips, they depict figures which seem to emerge from some psychic chaos. While the bodies are generally indecipherable aside from the occasional meandering line defining a hand, a leg or a pair of breasts, the faces are easier to read. Oversized round heads with blank open eves and sensuous lips are sometimes redrawn slightly differently several times, so that features seem to vibrate. In other works, the drawing is virtually rubbed out, giving the images a ghostlike quality.

The obvious precedents are Francis Bacon's early X-ray paintings and de Kooning's women. But while de Kooning was shattering images of adult, fully sexualized women, Glantzman's subject is the pubescent girl, on the brink of adolescence and sexuality. Thus the frenzied energy which pervades these figures is meant to be read as an emanation of the inner turmoil of that turbulent time of life.

The moment of a girl's awakening to womanhood is a compelling artistic subject, perhaps never better treated than by Edvard Munch in his haunting representation of a naked young girl staring fearfully into the future. Recently James Rosenquist also took a crack at the subject with a series of paintings featuring demonic dolls' heads trapped between innocence and malice. For all the fever of its Neo-Expressionist style, Glantzman's version is, by contrast, oddly uninflected. It is hard to read an emotion on the blank faces of her childwomen. They seem to be almost entirely in the grip of an unconscious physicality which does not yet admit the possibility of self-awareness.

If something seems missing from Glantzman's treatment of the emotional tribulations of adolescence, these are still vivid and exciting paintings. The artist has moved beyond the awkward drawing style that was apparently a badge of sincerity in the East Village days. Here she handles her materials with aplomb, weaving together complex layers of brushstrokes and patches of color with the deceptive ease of the mature painter.