For Art Basel 2025, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to announce a solo presentation of paintings by American artist Judith Godwin. Highlighting works across her six-decade career, this is the late artist’s first solo presentation in continental Europe, following a solo exhibition with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, in 2024. Godwin has long been recognised as a pioneering figure in the landscape of American art. Her contribution to the New York avant-garde began in the 1950s when she became associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement, forging a unique visual language of modernism and abstraction. Her legacy defies the challenges she faced as a result of both her sex and sexuality.
Godwin moved to New York in 1953 to study at the Arts Student League under Hans Hofmann, whose early influence can be seen in her dynamic approach to composition and colour. Duet with Hofmann (1953), spiralling and daring, and the sun-drenched Parrot from the same year, pay tribute to her tutelage under Hofmann, whose approach to ‘push and pull’ in painting invested Godwin’s painting with bold colour and spatial depth. In the years prior to this period, Godwin began a life-long friendship with the modern dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, inviting Graham to perform at her Alma Mater Mary Baldwin College. As Godwin transitioned to life in New York, her painting became increasingly inspired by Graham’s performances, her circular forms and sweeping arcs becoming painterly translations of Graham’s body in motion.
As the 1950s continued, the artist’s work took on larger proportions and a darker palette, all the while maintaining an organicism and proclivity for light and space in her evocation of the spiritual in nature. Introduced to Zen Buddhism by AbEx painter Kenzo Okada, such philosophies began to play a larger role in Godwin’s painting, encapsulated by calligraphic brushwork, redolent too of Franz Kline, another close friend of Godwin. The influential art dealer Betty Parsons included Godwin as the youngest artist in the inaugural exhibition at Section Eleven Gallery in 1958, one of four artists alongside Agnes Martin, and went on to present solo exhibitions of her work in 1959 and 1960.
Painted in 1958, the year that catapulted Godwin to broad art world recognition, Series 7, No 9 is exemplary of the monochromatic influence of Kline’s black struts and girders, and her own interest in depth and opacity. Godwin’s bold areas of black brushwork project above layered washes of ultramarines and pinks, a faint light shining through the drips and hollows between forms. Other examples from this series can be found in the collections of Yale University Art Gallery, CT, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX.
During the 1960s, as Pop Art and Minimalism began their ascent, Godwin distanced herself from New York, retreating to Connecticut where she trained in masonry, carpentry, and landscape architecture. Red Lightning (1966) draws from this period, with dominant flashes of red marking a departure from her late 1950’s black and white studies as the physicality of her manual labour translated into a bolder palette. Her return to the city in 1974 demonstrated a robust communion with the outdoors that invoked the power of nature.
Working through to the early 2000’s, Godwin increasingly became emboldened to integrate varied brushwork, collaged elements and studio detritus into her works. In Polar Night (1994) trimmings of spare canvas and a thick circle of synthetic brush hairs adorn the artist’s textural medley of diluted splashes, staining and drips, or impasto touches of oil straight from the tube. Ever inspired by Martha Graham’s freedom of motion, the liberation of the body and its inherent sensuality became a hallmark of Godwin’s late practice. She died in 2021 at the age of 91, just as her work began to reach new audiences worldwide.
Her lasting legacy is in the transformative nature of her practice, which successfully recalibrated the masculine language of gestural abstraction, shifting representations of womanhood and sexual identity on the canvas.
Judith Godwin (b. 1930, Suffolk, Virginia, d. 2021) studied at Mary Baldwin College, Virginia; College of William and Mary, Virginia; Art Students League, NY; and the Hans Hofmann School, NY. She received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, and an Honorary Doctorate of Human Letters from Mary Baldwin College, VA.
In 2024 Pippy Houldsworth Gallery presented Expressions of Life, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. The artist’s recent exhibitions include Modern Woman, Berry Campbell, NY (2023); Action/Gesture/Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970, Whitechapel Gallery, London, travelling to Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles and Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld (2022-24); Something Wicked, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX (2022); Postwar Women, Art Students League, NY (2019); A Gesture of Conviction | Women of Abstract Expressionism, Setareh Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); and Women of Abstract Expressionism, Denver Art Museum, CO (2016). Godwin has also had solo exhibitions at Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; The Delaware Contemporary, DE; Albany Museum of Art, NY; and the Amarillo Museum of Art, TX.
Collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; and Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth, TX, amongst others.
