metaphor contemporary art is pleased to announce the exhibition Mary Judge: Studies in Segmented Form, featuring new sculpture, site specific wall drawing, and works on canvas and paper.

In her new body of work Mary Judge broadens and expands upon her continuing interest in explorations of modular form developing intricate circular motifs in a variety of media. Her process begins with the creation and definition of discreet formal units that are then layered or repeated around a 360 degree axis to form her engaging mandala-like works. This exhibition highlights three related yet highly distinct material approaches to her systemic methodology. First there is a new group of her familiar spolvero works on both paper and canvas and directly on the walls of the gallery, in which powdered earthen pigments are pounced through templates onto paper or directly onto the walls. This technique, which dates back to the Renaissance, yields images of great intricacy and warmth suffused with references to a rich cache of sources ranging from organic natural forms, through various patterning systems of the decorative arts, and on to universal spiritual symbology.

The exhibition will also feature large scaled monoprints created during a recent residency at the Wildwood Press. These works, combining the delicacy of hand made paper with the brute clarity of laser cut steel plates, provide a fascinating primer on the possibilities inherent in Judge’s modular approach. Using a fixed number of plate designs, Judge has created a sense of limitless variation through her experiments with layering, ink color and viscosity. The resulting one of a kind prints from her Rose Window series span the subtly monochromatic to the boldly graphic in works of great authority and presence.

Finally, the exhibition will turn focus to Judge’s recent intensive work in sculpture showcasing several new works created within the last year. In these works in cast cement Judge turns her circular motifs horizontally parallel to the floor and then extends their forms to the supporting ground. Judge capitalizes on the capability of fluid cement to capture the crisp imprint of the molds that she employs while at the same time reveling in surface variations inherent in the material. Concrete is a humble material more often associated with construction than fine art but in these elegant cast sculptures Judge conjures images of truncated classical columns through her use of curvatures drawn from the history of architecture.

From the essay by Stephen Westfall in the forthcoming catalog Mary Judge , Prints at Wildwood Press, “Judge’s work is almost paradigmatically post-Minimalist. We’ll find all the recognitions of post-Minimalism in her work: the expressive use of material surfaces, its revelation of hand labor and relation to the scale of the body, and its invocation of historical forms. I think these characteristics can be essentialized into one concept: the retention of memory. Minimalism tended to mistrust the invocation of memory while Judge celebrates its inevitability and offers hints of personal revelation. ... in all her work, there is a taut balance of recognitions that’s haunted by our own historical memory: light and dark, exterior and interior, hand and machine, near and far, singularity and repetition, geometry and chance.u201D;