Judy Ledgerwood | Hyperallergic
Judy Ledgerwood, "Golden Hour" (2025), oil on canvas, 84 × 96 inches
by John YauIt was immediately apparent when I walked into Gray Gallery’s spacious, living room-like uptown space that the dimensions of the four paintings in Judy Ledgerwood’s exhibition were determined by those of the walls on which they hung. A single work occupied two of the walls, while two equally sized canvases held a dialogue on the third.
Ledgerwood’s manipulation of formal structure within individual works accelerated my appreciation of her play with dimensions, from the skewed linear grid of unequal triangles occupied by a hand-drawn trefoil in “Vitamin C” (all works 2025) to the vibrant opticality of different trefoils, some of them mirrored, dispersed across a monochromatic ground in “Crepuscolo.” Hung on opposite walls, this pairing made me look more closely at how each of the four paintings talked to each other as well as held their own ground.
I have always thought of Ledgerwood as a consummate painter who transformed the rigidity of Pattern and Decoration’s reliance on repetition into a mode of improvisation and surprise. The eye-opener was the manner in which she undid the movement’s decorous decorum into something fanciful, forthright, and frankly vulgar. This goes back to Willem de Kooning’s ostentatious nudes and their trace of misogyny, which Ledgerwood also upends. The quatrefoils and trefoils we see in her paintings are comical evocations of female genitalia, a bad boy’s graffiti on a bathroom wall. I once compared them to “Henri Matisse’s cut-outs […] romanced by anthropomorphic cartoon mice.” And yet, what we see is not vulgarity, but the frank celebration of female sexuality. I am reminded of something the painter David Reed once said to his dealer, Nicholas Wilder: “My ambition in life is to be a bedroom painter.”