Judy Rifka Abstract Expressionist Oil Painting, 1983

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Hand signed verso, mixed media on two sections of joined canvas
Work is titled "Ego Wall with Mess," circa 1983. … Read more Hand signed verso, mixed media on two sections of joined canvas
Work is titled "Ego Wall with Mess," circa 1983. Provenance: Brooke Alexander Gallery, New York, New York. bearing their label verso.
24 x 30 x 3-3/4 inches (61.0 x 76.2 x 9.5 cm) Hand signed on the reverse: Judy Rifka


Judy Rifka (born 1945) is an American woman artist active since the 1970s as a painter and video artist. She works heavily in New York City's Tribeca and Lower East Side and has associated with movements coming out of the area in the 1970s and 1980s such as Colab and the East Village, Manhattan art scene. A video artist, book artist and abstract painter, Rifka is a multi-faceted artist who has worked in a variety of media in addition to her painting and printmaking. She was born in 1945 in New York City and studied art at Hunter College, the New York Studio School and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.
Rifka took part in the 1980 Times Square Show, (Organized by Collaborative Projects, Inc. in 1980 at what was once a massage parlor, with now-famous participants such as Jenny Holzer, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kiki Smith, the roster of the exhibition reads like a who’s who of the art world), two Whitney Museum Biennials (1975, 1983), Documenta 7, Just Another Asshole (1981), curated by Carlo McCormick and received the cover of Art in America in 1984 for her series, "Architecture," which employed the three-dimensional stretchers that she adopted in exhibitions dating to 1982; in a 1985 review in the New York Times, Vivien Raynor noted Rifka's shift to large paintings of the female nude, which also employed the three-dimensional stretchers. In a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, Bianca Jagger played a character attacked in front of Rifka's three-dimensional nude still-life, "Bacchanaal", which was on display at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale. Rene Ricard wrote about Rifka in his influential December 1987 Art Forum article about the iconic identity of artists from Van Gogh to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, The Radiant Child.The untitled acrylic painting on plywood, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist's use of plywood as a substrate for painting. Artist and writer Mark Bloch called her work "imaginative surfaces that support experimental laboratories for interferences in sensuous pigment." According to artist and curator Greg de la Haba, Judy Rifka's irregular polygons on plywood "are among the most important paintings of the decade".
In 2013, Rifka's daily posts on Facebook garnered a large social media audience for her imaginative "selfies," erudite friendly comments, and widely attended solo and group exhibitions, Judy Rifka's pop art figuration is noted for its nervous line and frenetic pace. In the January 1998 issue of Art in America, Vincent Carducci echoed Masheck, “Rifka reworks the neo-classical and the pop, setting all sources in quotation for today’s art-world cognoscenti.” Rifka, along with artists like David Wojnarowicz, helped to take Pop sensibility into a milieu that incorporated politics and high art into Postmodernism; Robert Pincus-Witten stated in his 1988 essay, Corinthian Crackerjacks & Passing Go that "Rifka’s commitment to process and discovery, doctrine with Abstract Expressionist practice, is of paramount concern though there is nothing dogmatic or pious about Rifka’s use of method. Playful rapidity and delight in discovery is everywhere evident in her painting." In 2016, a large retrospective of Rifka's art was shown at the Jean-Paul Najar Foundation in Dubai. In 2017, Gregory de la Haba presented a Rifka retrospective at the Amstel Gallery in The Yard, a section of Manhattan described as "a labyrinth of small cubicles, conference rooms and small office spaces that are rented out to young entrepreneurs, professionals and hipsters". In 2019 her video Bubble Dancers New Space Ritual was selected for the International Istanbul Bienali.
Alexandra Goldman Talks To Judy Rifka About Ionic Ironic: Mythos from the '80s at CORE:Club and the Inexistence of "Feminist Art" Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. She was included in "50 Contemporary Women Artists", a book comprising a refined selection of current and impactful artists. The foreword is by Elizabeth Sackler of the Brooklyn Museum’s Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Additional names in the book include sculptor and carver Barbara Segal and mixed media artist Stephanie Hirsch as well as Judy Chicago, and Teresita Fernandez, the first Latina woman to be appointed to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (an appointment decided by President Obama in 2011).

Select Exhibitions:
Franklin Furnace
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, MoMA
Documenta VII, Kassel
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Carnegie Mellon University
Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York
The Brooklyn Museum
Moderner Kunst, Vienna
Laforet Museum, Tokyo
The Hudson River Museum
Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach
The Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.
Museum fur Kultur, in Berlin and Hamburg, Germany
Gracie Mansion, the residence of the Mayor in New York City
Chocolate Factory, New York City
Gallery X, New York City
Brooke Alexander, New York City
Galerie Tobias Hirshman (Frankfurt, Germany)
Ann Jaffee Gallery (Bay Harbor Islands, Florida)
Anna Friebe Galerie, Cologne
Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco, California
Galerie de France (Paris),
Printed Matter, New York City
Jean Paul Najar, Paris
John Doyle Gallery, Chicago

Select Public Collections:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York Public Library
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Massachusetts;
Staatliche Museum, Berlin, Germany. See less