C. Carr: Judy Glantzman
This Judy Glantzman piece has presided over my workspace now for decades. It’s an un-portrait. That’s my name for it because Judy’s work is about people who are not posing. She’s caught them in the middle of something. Her big pictures are often teeming with faces that project all kinds of emotion and so many unknown dramas. I love great theater and performance and spent many years writing about it. Is that what drew me in? As I try to articulate what I love in this work, I think of a piece in Judy’s last show (at Betty Cunningham, November 29, 2018 – January 13, 2019). She painted 36 iterations of a school picture taken of her friend David Wojnarowicz when he was ten or twelve. Laid out in a square grid, each version of his face has a different feel. This is a posed portrait, of course, but she’s shaken it. She’s added nuance. As if to say that every moment has layers. As for the picture in my room here, I know I identified with this little girl: that look of uncertainty, those legs that might be too twisted to hit the ground.
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