Featured Works

Judy Pfaff is included in the exhibition After "The Wild": Contemporary Art from The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Collection, on view at The Jewish Museum through 1 October 2023.

Judy Pfaff's solo exhibition smokkfiskur: a tale is now on view at the Museum of New Art, Portsmouth, NH

Judy Pfaff's exhibition at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill is now on view through 2 September 2022.

"Judy Pfaff’s current installation of wall-hung works (on view through February 18, 2022) is aptly titled “opsins,” after the tiny proteins that calibrate color within the eye’s light-sensitive retinas." 

It was a crisp early autumn day that I drove to Judy Pfaff’s home and studios near Tivoli. She lives and works in a series of barns and outbuildings that still have the rough-and-tumble sense of a working fam, with areas that have the cool geometric feel of a setting for contemporary art. Upon hearing me near the door, two big dogs barked and wagged their tails at the same time, jumping all over me once the door opened. At seventy-two, Judy has the air of a woman at least fifteen years younger, and I’m immediately put at easy while she yells orders to her dogs but laughs as they continue to lurch toward me.

Judy Pfaff’s recent show featured five major wall reliefs (all 2018) that resemble discrete exhibitions unto themselves. The series is titled “Quartet,” with works numbered one though four and a fifth designated Quartet + 1. Demonstrating the artist’s distinctive merger of painting and sculpture, these assemblages—which average some ten by fourteen feet and bear elements that extend up to five feet into the gallery space—feature rhythmical arrangements of found objects and items made by Pfaff against backgrounds of digitally abstracted photographic imagery mounted on fiberboard panels. Conflict between technology and the environment, artifice and nature, seems to be a theme of the works, which combine melted plastic buckets and pictures of flowers, wire fencing and biomorphic forms, geometric patterns and expressive painterly gestures.

The Katonah Museum of Art is pleased to present:

LandEscape: New Visions of the Landscape from the Early 20th and 21st Centuries

On view 17 March through 16 June, the group exhibition features works by American Modernists Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Helen Torr and Marguerite Zorach alongside contemporary artists April Gornik, Judy Pfaff, Jo Baer, Lois Dodd, Shara Hughes, and Alex Katz.

ARTnews sat down with Judy Pfaff during the installation of her current solo exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery to discuss breaking boundaries in her career, life as a female artist in the 1970s, and eluding categorization in her work.

On view at 520 West 21st Street through 9 March, Miles McEnery Gallery is also presenting a solo booth of Judy Pfaff's work at ADAA's The Art Show from February 28 to March 3, at Park Avenue Armory.

"Sculptors ReCollected" turns the Massry Gallery at the College of Saint Rose into what is almost a primer on contemporary sculpture and sculptural installation. Francis Cape, James Clark, and Judy Pfaff are each given a third of the gallery to make very different dimensional statements as part of a splashy 10th anniversary celebration of the Massry.

The Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University is pleased to present: 

Terrain: The Space Between from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, Ffeaturing work by Vija Celmins, Judy Pfaff and Ed Ruscha

28 September, 2018 – 5 January, 2019

Senior & Shopmaker is pleased to present Spheres of Influence: Al Held, Michael Craig-Martin, Judy Pfaff, and Stanley Whitney, a group exhibition of drawings by preeminent abstract painter and former Yale professor, Al Held (1928-2005), along with three illustrious former students from the Yale School of Art graduate program, Michael Craig-Martin (MFA 1966); Judy Pfaff (MFA 1973); and Stanley Whitney (MFA 1972). 
Craig-Martin, Pfaff, and Whitney have each acknowledged the impact Held had on the development of their critical thinking and practice during their student years and beyond. This exhibition brings together works on paper, dating from 1963 to 2018, from which common themes emerge.

Gaa Gallery Wellfleet is pleased to present:

Judy Pfaff :  × × × ÷ ÷ ÷ = = = + + +,

July through 11 August, 2018

Curated by Jason Andrew Organized by Norte Maar Sponsored by the ownership at 1285 Avenue of the Americas Norte Maar and the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery announce the exhibition To be a Lady: Forty-Five Women in the Arts, on view at the 1285 Avenue of the Americas Art Gallery from September 24, 2012 through January 18, 2013. A reception, open to the public, will be held on Monday, September 24 from 6-8pm.

Including 38 works spanning Judy Pfaff's career, from early works on paper to contemporary paper collages, installations and sculpture. click here : www.hmoa.org

NEW PALTZ – The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art will celebrate its 10th anniversary on Saturday, October 15. The Dorsky first opened to the public in April 2001 and was officially dedicated on October 20, 2001.The events of next weekend will honor past Hudson Valley Master artists Lesley Dill, Robert Morris, Don Nice, Judy Pfaff and Carolee Schneemann.click here : http://www.midhudsonnews.com

School of Visual Arts (SVA) presents "The Influentials," an exhibition featuring distinguished female alumni of the College and the diverse group of artists who have influenced their practice. "The Influentials" is both an investigation into the creative lineage between contemporary artists and a dialogue between mentors and mentees that crosses generations, gender and media. The exhibition is co-curated by independent curator Amy Smith-Stewart adn SVA Director of Development and Alumni Affairs Carrie Lincourt.

Through a distinguished career that stretches back to the 1970s, she has exhibited internationally and received many prestigious awards—including a MacArthur Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grants. Pfaff has also been strongly dedicated to education in the arts.

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro is pleased to present the exhibition Judy Pfaff: Falk Visiting Artist. The internationally renowned artist is one of the pioneers of installation art, which is work that is site-specific and three-dimensional. Since the 1970s, she has been on the forefront of combining aspects of sculpture, painting, and architecture to form dynamic works that transcend aesthetic boundaries.

Judy Pfaff, who once wowed the art world with her formally and spatially inventive installation art, has recently turned her attention to paper. Her newest pieces, shown here, exist in box-like metal frames defining a narrow band of space—maybe five inches deep. Viewers should not let the works’ apparent flowery “decorativeness” dissuade them from inspecting all that is happening within this shallow space. Pfaff still has an uncanny grasp of spatial complexities. The details in these works provide sustenance for eyes starved of unabashed beauty. It’s as if she were compressing a gallery’s worth of glorious installation art into a confined space.