Artist Judy Glantzman: The face of things

Sunday News (Lancaster, PA)
By MaryAlice Bitts

Judy Glantzman's constantly evolving, 25-year art career began in a big way - with a splashy initiation into the buzzing, often glamorous art scene of New York City's East Village in the 1980s.

The name of the game was neo-expressionism, a raw, primitive, sometimes violently emotional artistic style influenced by German expressionists of the 1920s. It was a style designed to chafe against minimalist works of the previous era.
From the early to mid-'80s, East Village galleries were routinely packed with the fashionable elite, and artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl and Julian Schnabel became instant celebrities.

Glantzman, a young artist producing heavily textured, abstract, graffitilike work, was at the right place at the right time. Five years after graduating from art school, she was showing her work in trendy galleries and tallying up the sales.

"It was a great thing for me," Glantzman said in a telephone interview from her New York home. An exhibit of Glantzman's work opens this week and Pennsylvania College of Art & Design. "There was a lot of youthful exuberance. I think I did 25 group shows and five one-person shows in one year. It was an anything-goes kind of time."

She kept that frenetic pace for the next four years, but everything changed when a new, more cerebral postmodern movement became all the rage. It was, she said, a blow.

"I had no idea it could all end so fast," Glantzman said. The stylistic shift was partially due to a changing political climate that emphasized the relationship between art and commerce, she said, and partially due to the impact of the AIDS epidemic on the New York art community.

"Many of the people in the East Village were gay, and suddenly they were dying of AIDS. All of a sudden, some of the best and brightest were no longer there," she said. "We were going to funerals all the time."

It was a life-changing experience.

"If you see people dying, you say to yourself, 'What do I really care about? What's at the core of my beliefs?' It can strengthen your resolve because you know what matters to you. It's about allowing yourself to take a tremendous risk. In my case, it's the risk of really exposing yourself."
So Glantzman secured an inexpensive studio in Jersey City, N.J., and got to work.

Over the course of five years, Glantzman reinvented herself, with the simple aim of creating art on her own, newly honed terms. The result was haunting drawings and paintings of solitary, fragile human forms.

She enjoyed a second round of success in the late '90s, and when that cycle ended, Glantzman literally went back to the drawing board.

"We have all of these preconceptions about how we make our own work. I had to get past that," she said. Glantzman began to rethink the works that had brought her some success over the previous 15 to 20 years. A revelation came during a working summer vacation.

"I drew a circle, and the more I worked on it, the more I wanted to include in it," she recalled. "It was like I couldn't stop."

A new style emerged, but this time, her transformation was informed not by the sobering loss of loved ones, but by the equally transformative creation of new life.

Glantzman and her artist husband had a daughter, Lila, in 1997. Motherhood made all the difference, in her life and in her work.

First, there was the practical issue of giving a young child the intense, continuous attention she required. "It wasn't easy to focus on one thought, without distraction, with a young child in the house. The universe becomes very small. It was almost like I could create a giant world that I could enter into. And I could put into it anything that I wanted. The possibilities were unlimited."

As she expanded the world on her canvases, she noticed a similar expansion of her focus on life.
"I think that, having a child, you become progressively less the center of the universe. You become less egocentric," Glantzman said.

In her paintings, Glantzman's solitary women gave way to depictions of mothers and daughters and interweaving, disembodied heads, feet and hands.

Her images of perfectly intertwined mothers and daughters create a striking depiction of the complex bond between mother and child. Faces seem to simultaneously emerge from, and recede into, the background, as if vibrating in and out of an alternate spiritual plane.

Glantzman said she realized recently that these autobiographical works depict not only impressions of her relationship with her daughter, but with her mother, who also is an artist.
Glantzman obsessively works and reworks these figures, giving them a ghostly aura that makes them appear at once distant and sharp, in much the same way that the daily pleasures of parenting can occupy the same psychic space as the frustrations, worry and pain.

When asked about the uneasy vibe her paintings emit, the artist was matter-of-fact.

"All of the work is like a Rorschach test," Glantzman said. "If I give myself the freedom to really let things come out, sometimes what comes out is disturbing to some people.

"I think my work is both a real celebration of life that also shows the dark side. It's both sides of the coin."