Judy Pfaff is known for working in large scale, creating exuberant site-specific installations that incorporate diverse materials like wire, string, lights, plastic tubing, sheets of metal, and fabric. In the 1970s, when other artists were creating serial Minimalist work, Pfaff, along with like-minded artists Gordon Matta-Clark,Lynda Benglis, and Richard Tuttle, made gutsy, chaotic installations full of color and life. According to Pfaff, installation projects allow her “to plunge into that spacey void and edit the chaos into a dramatic and sensual environment.” Pfaff was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004.
British-American, b. 1946, London, United Kingdom, based in Kingston, New York and Tivoli, New York.
Untitled, “Somewhere Before” 2015
Artificial flowers, plexiglass, paper, melted plastics.
Balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making, Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole. A pioneer of installation art in the 1970s, Pfaff synthesizes sculpture, painting, and architecture into dynamic environments, in which space seems to expand and collapse, fluctuating between the two- and three-dimensional.
Pfaff’s site-specific installations pierce through walls and careen through the air, achieving lightness and explosive energy. Pfaff’s work is a complex ordering of visual information, composed of steel, fiberglass, and plaster as well as salvaged signage and natural elements such as tree roots. She has extended her interest in natural motifs in a series of prints integrating vegetation, maps, and medical illustrations, and has developed her dramatic sculptural materials into set designs for several theatrical stage productions.
Isla, 2011, 22" x 22" x 22", plastic debris (PET), aluminum rivets, tinted polycrylic + mica powder
Major fan of all of Judy Pfaff's sculptures and installation. Each individual elements in her works reminds me of out of the world creatures and landscapes.
The creative use of materials combined with meticulous installations and compositing within a space would be something i hope to be able to achieve in the project.
The defamiliarisation of the plastic materials in her works was also a strong point of refernece for the project.
There Is a Field, I Will Meet you There (Rumi) 2015
Melted plastic, pigmented expanded foam, acrylic, resin, plexi glass, steel, cardboard, paper lanterns, fluorescents.
In Holi/ crazy love, I loved the contrast of the pop coloured wall against the vibrant plastic pieces!
The entire installation eludes a sense of play and it was also visually captivating along with the strong shadows created by the lights!
Holi / Crazy Love
Steel wires, plastics, shellacked Chinese paper lanterns, and fluorescent light
57″ x 66″ x 20″
