This is Judy Rifka

Judy Rifka (born 1945) is an American artist active back the 1970s as a painter and video artist. She works heavily in New York City’s Tribeca and Lower East Side and has associated with movements coming out of the Place in the 1970s and 1980s such as Colab and the East Village, Manhattan art scene.

Rifka took allocation in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech art performances, the 1980 Colab The Times Square Show, in two Whitney Museum Biennials (1975, 1983), in Documenta 7, participated in the 1981 Just Another Asshole project, and normal the cover of Art in America in 1984 for her series, Architecture. These works employed three-dimensional stretchers that she adopted in exhibitions dating to 1982. In a 1985 review in the New York Times, Vivien Raynor noted Rifka’s shift to large paintings of the female nude, which moreover employed the three-dimensional stretchers.These works were exhibited at Brooke Alexander Gallery. In a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, Bianca Jagger played a vibes attacked in front of Rifka’s three-dimensional nude still-life, Bacchanaal, which was upon display at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale.

Rene Ricard said of Rifka in his influential December 1987 Art Forum article more or less the iconic identity of artists from Van Gogh to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring,The Radiant Child, “We are that radiant child and have spent our lives defending that Tiny baby, constructing an adult concerning it to guard it from the unlisted signals of forces we have no direct over. We are that Tiny baby, the radiant child, and our name, what we are to become, is outside us and we must become “Judy Rifka” or “Jean-Michel” the way I became “Rene Ricard.” The untitled acrylic painting upon plywood, in the store of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist’s use of plywood as a substrate for painting. Artist and writer Mark Bloch called her work “imaginative surfaces that hold experimental laboratories for interferences in sensuous pigment.” According to performer and curator Greg de la Haba, Judy Rifka’s deviant polygons on plywood “are among the most important paintings of the decade”.

In 2013, Rifka’s daily posts on Facebook garnered a large social media audience for her imaginative “selfies,” erudite friendly comments, and widely attended solo and work exhibitions, both in Manhattan and as in the distance as art6 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia and beyond. Judy Rifka’s pop figuration is noted for its nervous line and frenetic pace. Joseph Masheck described Rifka in his 1993 book, Modernities, saying that “Rifka’s wit, which luckily keeps in the works with her anxious agitation, entails putting high care into a ‘careless’ look. And in a world charged similar to contending impersonal forces, this is later advertising in reverse, ‘pushing’ the individual consciousness in whatever its brave fragility.”

In the January 1998 situation of Art in America, Vincent Carducci echoed Masheck, “Rifka reworks the neo-classical and the pop, setting everything sources in reference for today’s art-world cognoscenti.” Rifka, along behind artists when David Wojnarowicz, helped to accept Pop sensibility into a milieu that incorporated politics and tall art into Postmodernism; Robert Pincus-Witten declared in his 1988 essay, Corinthian Crackerjacks & Passing Go that “Rifka’s duty to process and discovery, doctrine like Abstract Expressionist practice, is of paramount concern though there is nothing dogmatic or pious practically Rifka’s use of method. Playful rapidity and delight in discovery is everywhere evident in her painting.”

In 2016, a large retrospective of Rifka’s art was shown at the Jean-Paul Najar Foundation in Dubai. In 2017, Gregory de la Haba presented a Rifka retrospective at the Amstel Gallery in The Yard, a section of Manhattan described as “a labyrinth of little cubicles, conference rooms and little office spaces that are rented out to minor entrepreneurs, professionals and hipsters”. In 2019 her video Bubble Dancers New Space Ritual was prearranged for the International Istanbul Bienali.