THE ART SHOW

February 27 - March 1, 2020
theartshow.com

Judy Fox pioneered painted figuration in the 1980's, transposing iconic images from various cultures into finely rendered figures with period coiffures, sculpted in terra cotta, painted in many layers of casein paint.  Unlike most sculptors, she carves her terra cotta after the clay dries affording opportunity for great detail and verisimilitude.

Her work of the past 5 years, entitled “Garden” germinates from the biblical Genesis story.  In Eden, a Serpent tempts Eve to taste fruit from the forbidden tree, a transgression she shares with Adam.  In this scenario, Eve is the central figure. She is posed after the famous Lucas Cranach painting, a pale beauty with waves of blond hair who coyly hides an apple behind her back.  Her inquisitive eye is caught by a surrealist Snake Tree with a visceral sensuality and an apple-red face.  Eve is surrounded by a multitude of highly colored imagined Eden plants, which combine wildly imaginative plant-like, creature-like sensual components to complete the tableau.  The plants manifest biological themes of growth, competition, reproduction, and physiology, framing Eve and the tree with an evolutionary take on creation.  Adam is not present.

This installation ruminates upon our understanding of the origins of humanness:  the emergence of self-consciousness and morality from the imperatives of biology and evolution.  The Christian image of Eve is superimposed upon an anthropological one.    Physically this universal ancestor is a hybrid of references: to the Cranach, to Eden's Mesopotamian location, to genetically ancient tribes, to western concepts of otherness.   As in the European tradition, her physique displays her status as a fertile virgin and a timeless ideal of seductive beauty, her body image transformed by our current understanding of prehistory.

Judy Fox is a sculptor who works in New York City.  As an undergraduate she studied sculpture at Yale (BA 1978) and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  She received advanced degrees in Art History (MA 1983) and Conservation (1985) from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

The artist has participated in numerous exhibitions around the US and Europe. A fellow of both Yaddo and Macdowell residencies, she has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the "Anonymous Was a Woman" Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy of Design, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She has had solo exhibitions at: The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; Kunsthalle im Pallazo, Liestal, Switzerland.