GRAY is pleased to participate in the 2025 edition of Frieze New York 2025 with a two-person exhibition of paintings by Judy Ledgerwood (b. 1959) and Leon Polk Smith (1906 - 1996). Polk Smith and Ledgerwood's practices, via queer and feminist lenses respectively, confront and expand the history of abstract painting by decentering perceptions of abstraction's neutrality.
Michigan-based artist Judy Ledgerwood challenges abstract painting's minimalist, male-centric mileu with unapologetically feminine colors and forms. With repetitive circular shapes and her signature quatrefoil pattern, Ledgerwood bends and relaxes the traditional grid by incorporating influences from the Pattern & Decoration movement, quilting, and textiles into her bold, thickly impastoed paintings. Ledgerwood offers a compelling counterpoint to Minimalism's perfection in paintings of great formal rigor that also retain the energy of their making.
Working in response to the rigidity of Mondrian’s geometric abstraction and the dominance of Modernism in his time, Leon Polk Smith pursued gently warped geometries and shaped canvases that allowed his compositions to expand beyond the limitations of the painting's edge. Polk Smith made careful and deliberate color choices, typically only two or three colors per painting, that activate the canvas from an optical perspective, creating the tension and vibration of a total environment. Even when working in a rectilinear format, Smith did not want the outside shape to "determine the arrangement of what is on or inside it.”
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