As part of our presentation at Untitled Art Miami Beach, Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to announce a special project by Judy Pfaff, entitled El Patio. This installation will be on view in Special Projects Booth 6 from Tuesday, December 3, and continues through Sunday, December 8th.
Judy Pfaff’s prolific artistic career spans more than five decades. Highly influential and renowned for her site-specific installations, Pfaff continues to work at the forefront of avant-garde practices by ceaselessly reinventing her distinctive visual lexicon and embracing unusual combinations of materials. Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, she creates exuberant, sprawling artworks that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation but is perhaps best described as painting in space.
Pfaff’s large-scale installations inhabit and transform their environments, becoming ad hoc homes for viewers and the artist. El Patio, 1988, is a classic example of this kind of work, combining a bright, riotous palette with sweeping diagonal lines and a playfully off-kilter sense of balance. The 1980s were a particularly momentous period in Pfaff’s career. That decade, she won an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship and was included in the 1981 and 1987 Whitney Biennials. That same decade, she exhibited work at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Renaissance Society, the Venice Biennale, Buffalo AKG Art Museum (then the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, P.S.1, CAM Houston, Yale University Art Gallery, and many more. El Patio represents the culmination of this breakthrough decade, and the crystallization of Pfaff’s genre-defying strategies.
Judy Pfaff (b. 1946, London, UK) received a BFA from Washington University Saint Louis and an MFA from Yale University, where she studied with Al Held. Often regarded as a pioneer of installation art, Pfaff has held hundreds of exhibitions in the United States and abroad and received numerous prestigious awards, including the International Sculpture Center's Lifetime Achievement Award (2014), a MacArthur Fellowship (2004), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). She has exhibited work in the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1981, and 1987 and represented the United States in the 1998 Sao Paulo Bienal. Pfaff's works reside in the permanent collections of MOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, NY.