Judy Ledgerwood
September 10 - November 1, 2025 | Gray Gallery, New York
Twilight in the Wilderness debuts four large-scale canvases that continue Ledgerwood’s career-long exploration of radiant color and architectural scale through a feminist reworking of the painterly grid.
For over forty years, Judy Ledgerwood has pushed the boundaries of abstraction. Her chromatic language subverts and reimagines historically male-dominated traditions of Color Field painting and Minimalism, transforming visual pleasure into a critical investigation of beauty and representation. Her large scale paintings often appear like textiles, pinned from the top and painted edge-to-edge, and feature repeating quatrefoil patterns rendered with intentional irregularity. These immersive, optically charged compositions envelop the viewer, turning the act of looking into a fully embodied experience of beauty, color, and space. “For me,” Ledgerwood states, “the painting happens between the painting and the viewer.”
Titled after Frederic Edwin Church’s 1863 painting of a sunset, Twilight in the Wilderness presents four new paintings inspired by the drama and color of refracted light just before nightfall. Monumental in scale, these works blaze with hot pinks, golden yellows, burnt oranges, teals, and vivid greens—colors that heighten the works’ radiance and emotional intensity. Of the largest canvas, Vitamin C, art historian and curator Helen Molesworth writes: “A riot of tangled paint strokes, a filigreed layer of beachfront-hotel seafoam on top of an Orange Julius® ground? Whatever grid once held the substrate together has gone all akimbo.”
