Judy Ledgerwood's latest exhibition at Gray Gallery presents a provocative and sophisticated take on the Pattern and Decoration movement, transforming its traditional rigidity into a celebration of female sexuality and artistic improvisation. The show, titled "Twilight in the Wilderness," features four large-scale paintings that demonstrate the artist's ability to merge formal aesthetic concerns with bold feminist perspectives.
Upon entering Gray Gallery's spacious, living room-like uptown space, visitors immediately notice how Ledgerwood has tailored each painting's dimensions to perfectly fit the gallery walls. A single work occupies two walls, while two equally sized canvases engage in visual dialogue on a third wall. This strategic placement encourages viewers to consider how each piece communicates with the others while maintaining its individual artistic integrity.
Ledgerwood's manipulation of formal structure becomes particularly evident in works like "Vitamin C" (2025), which features a skewed linear grid of unequal triangles occupied by hand-drawn trefoils. In contrast, "Crepuscolo" displays vibrant optical effects through different trefoils, some mirrored, dispersed across a monochromatic background. These paintings, hung on opposite walls, create a compelling visual conversation that highlights the artist's range and technical mastery.
The artist has consistently demonstrated her ability to transform Pattern and Decoration's reliance on repetition into a mode of improvisation and surprise. What sets Ledgerwood apart is her willingness to abandon the movement's traditional decorum in favor of something more fanciful, forthright, and deliberately provocative. Her approach challenges and upends the trace of misogyny found in works like Willem de Kooning's ostentatious nudes.
The quatrefoils and trefoils featured throughout Ledgerwood's paintings serve as playful evocations of female genitalia, resembling what might be found as graffiti on a bathroom wall. These forms have been compared to "Henri Matisse's cut-outs romanced by anthropomorphic cartoon mice." However, rather than presenting vulgarity, the work celebrates female sexuality with frankness and joy, embodying painter David Reed's stated ambition to his dealer Nicholas Wilder: "My ambition in life is to be a bedroom painter."
"Crepusculo" exemplifies this approach through its pulsating field of mauve quatrefoils and distorted variations set against an orange background. Ledgerwood has painted an orange rectangle whose top and bottom edges sag in the middle, contrasting with the strict edges of her stretched canvas. With rivulets of orange and mauve paint dripping along the bottom edge, the irregular rectangle transforms into what appears to be a painted cloth, reminiscent of the cerulean blue and yellow fabric draped over a turquoise screen in Matisse's "The Pink Studio" (1911).
The key difference lies in Ledgerwood's medium – her cloth is constructed entirely of paint and drips. This technique suggests the artist's intention to relocate decorative fabric from the harem, a space both private and public, to the intimate space of the bedroom, emphasizing that the act of seeing art is fundamentally private.
While Renaissance Italy considered disegno (drawing) and colore (color) rival aesthetic approaches, Ledgerwood complicates this historical debate through her pairing of identically sized rectangles "Alpen Glow" and "Golden Hour" on the same wall. "Golden Hour" consists of a complex arrangement of mostly triangular shapes in pale pink, blue, violet, and orange, incorporating both solid lines and stained areas. This work successfully transports different strains of American painting – including Minimalism's grid, stain painting, and Pattern and Decoration – into a feminist worldview without becoming didactic or heavy-handed.
The technical complexity of Ledgerwood's work becomes apparent in her manipulation of geometric forms. Some triangles are aligned to flip between appearing as flat shapes and as two sides of a pyramid, creating tension between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality. Lines of trefoils meet across triangular sections to become quatrefoils, demonstrating how odd numbers can harmoniously fit into even ones. Some trefoils resemble graffiti representations of male genitalia, while others appear as monochromatic silhouettes of cartoon rodents.
This playful approach allows antic humor, joyful irreverence, aesthetic inquiry, and art historical references to coexist naturally within single compositions. Ledgerwood draws many trefoils using thick paint lines, particularly visible in the saturated colors of "Alpen Glow," with some elements deliberately allowed to drip. In spaces where two forms meet, viewers encounter thick twists of paint whose evocative ambiguity recalls lines from Gertrude Stein's erotic masterpiece "Tender Buttons" (1914): "Light blue and the same red with purple makes a change. It shows that there is no mistake. Any pink shows that and very likely it is reasonable."
Working within a deliberately limited vocabulary of forms and techniques, Ledgerwood continues to discover new ways to create visually sensuous experiences for viewers. Her paintings demonstrate that contemporary feminist art can be both intellectually rigorous and sensuously pleasurable, challenging traditional boundaries between high art and popular culture.
"Judy Ledgerwood: Twilight in the Wilderness" continues at Gray New York, located at 1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 2, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, through November 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery and represents a significant contribution to contemporary discussions about feminism, sexuality, and the ongoing relevance of historical art movements in current practice.
