Judy Pfaff b. 1946
El Patio, 1988
Steel, enamel, wood, and plastic
124 x 149 x 58 inches (315 x 378.5 x 147.3 cm)
CT-10010
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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...
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 exhibited work at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1981 and 1987 Whitney Biennials, Renaissance Society, 1982 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 (1988) represents the culmination of this breakthrough decade, and the crystallization of Pfaff’s genre-defying strategies.
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 exhibited work at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1981 and 1987 Whitney Biennials, Renaissance Society, 1982 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 (1988) represents the culmination of this breakthrough decade, and the crystallization of Pfaff’s genre-defying strategies.