This past summer, I worked at Judy Pfaff’s sprawling studio in upstate New York while she prepared for Light Years, her first solo show with Cristin Tierney Gallery. As Pfaff and her two assistants toiled in the garage where she welds and fires clay, the room where she shapes tubes of neon, the workspace where she makes drawings and encaustics, or the kitchen where she prepares a daily lunch for her crew, I hunkered down in a small office, inputting mostly two-dimensional works into a database comprising thousands of discrete objects from the early 1970s to the present: paintings, prints, photographs, drawings, sculptures, blueprints, and more. It’s a trove containing just about everything Pfaff has made throughout her career, except the installations for which she is best known. There’s really no need to track their details and whereabouts, as these installations are typically disassembled and discarded once a show closes.
Pfaff burst onto the scene in the mid-1970s, when austere minimalism was the prevailing attitude in fine art. In contrast, she created vibrant, sensorially immersive exhibitions in response to “the specific spatial geometries of the room, the ceiling, the street out the window,” to borrow her words. Her installations were not meant to be looked at from a safe distance, as one would a painting, but experienced in the round. An unabashed formalist, Pfaff wields an abstract language built of found and fabricated objects in every imaginable color, shape, size, and texture. Over the years, her exhibitions have continually expanded in ambition and emotional resonance, from her debut at Artists Space and her kaleidoscopic presentations at Holly Solomon Gallery in the ’70s and ’80s to the geometrical sublimity of Neither Here Nor There (2003) and the electrically charged mournfulness of Buckets of Rain (2006), both at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe Gallery.
Throughout our conversation, her golden retriever, Micky, occasionally wandered through, overturning the lightweight coffee table as we scrambled to rescue the glasses resting upon it.
