Judith Godwin

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presents American painter Judith Godwin’s first European solo exhibition, Expressions of Life, comprising an overview of the artist’s work from the early 1950s – the period in which she was associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement – to the end of the century. This inaugural exhibition richly illustrates the artist’s enduring influence over the landscape of American art despite the challenges she faced as a result of both her sex and sexuality.

Long underappreciated, Godwin’s contribution to the New York avant-garde has undergone recent revision following her inclusion in landmark exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum, Whitechapel Gallery and Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, that offered a reappraisal of women abstractionists of the 20th century. Her thesis was – and remained – one of liberation from the conventions of a movement anchored in a language of masculinity and heteronormativity. Starkly aware of the limitations imposed on her by the milieu in which she practiced, Godwin sought to redefine such ‘masculine’ values by way of gestural abstractions that brought a loose geometry into dialogue with nature, dance and Zen philosophy. Her innovative reorientation of the language of modernism remains a radical statement today.