P·P·O·W is pleased to present Playing with Dolls, Judy Glantzman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. A fixture of the 1980s East Village art scene and a dedicated art educator of over 30 years, Glantzman approaches her practice as an open and continuous engagement with the unconscious. Through paintings and ceramic works made between 2000 and 2025, the exhibition chronicles Glantzman’s lifelong dedication to channeling one’s inner impulses without judgement. Bursting with a cacophony of color and expression, the resulting imagery is both a marvelous and terrifying reflection of our time.
Judy Glantzman
Angel, 2000
oil on canvas
90 x 80 ins.
228.6 x 203.2 cm
Glantzman’s heroically scaled works immerse viewers in dichotomous physiological realties where inner voices speak to the chaotic and irrational heart of human existence. Often taking years to complete, her zealous and frenetic accumulations of diversely rendered self-portraits and disembodied heads, hands, and feet are created through a continuous process of layering, scraping, destroying, and reworking her surfaces. Glantzman generates emotionally raw iconographies by pulling from a multitude of art historical references, ranging from ancient Greek theatre to religious paintings of miracles. Across these works, hermetic and personal symbols bore out from the center of her canvases or are inscribed within triangular, haloed, cruciform, or totemic configurations.
Works such as Angel, 2000, from her iconic series of white paintings, were created in single sittings using a wet-on-wet technique that Glantzman developed following the death of her father and birth of her daughter. Lathering her canvas in thick white paint before inscribing it with a central female figure, she writes that, “In these paintings, the figure is emerging from the white as well as being swallowed back into it. The whole body of the painting is the figure, the paint its skin.”
Playing with Dolls will also include an operatic installation of hand built ceramic heads and hands. Blurring the line between painting and sculpture, the works appear to have leapt from the two-dimensional constraints of Glantzman’s painterly accumulations. Forming a silent choreography of outstretched hands and hundreds of faces, the installation expresses the insanity of our lives while celebrating artistic freedom in its purest form.
Judy Glantzman (b. 1956) was born in Long Island, NY and now lives and works in Chatham, NY. After graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978, she began exhibiting in the early 1980s East Village art scene at galleries such as Civilian Warfare, New York, NY, and Gracie Mansion, New York, NY. Since the 1990s, Glantzman has presented solo exhibitions at Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY; BlumHelman Gallery, New York, NY; Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY; Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, Lancaster, PA; Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York, NY; Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; and Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, Woodstock, NY; among others. In 2009, Glantzman presented a 30-year survey exhibition at Dactyl Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, New York, NY. Throughout her career, Glantzman has taught drawing and painting at institutions including the Rhode Island School of Design and the New York Studio School, among others. The artist’s work belongs to numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Grey Art Gallery, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Progressive Collection, Cleveland, OH; and the Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; among others. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, most notably the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Grant, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant.
Judy Glantzman
Judith and Holofernes, 2008
oil on canvas
65 x 64 ins.
165.1 x 162.6 cm
Judy Glantzman
Somewhere Over the Rainbow, 2004
oil on canvas
90 x 80 ins.
228.6 x 203.2 cm
Judy Glantzman
Wreath, 2006
oil on canvas
60 x 60 ins.
152.4 x 152.4 cm
