Mary Judge at Storefront

Several galleries in Bushwick will break from their regularly scheduled hours by being open this Friday, from 6-10. Among the galleries involved are Norte Maar, Famous Accountants, English Kills, Arch Collective, Centotto, Fortress to Solitude, Laundromat, Curbs and Stoops, and Storefront, whose exhibition of new works by Mary Page, Pop-Oculus, will be on view for only a couple more days. It's definitely worth a look.

Mary Judge, Pink Brush, 2011. Pigment and acrylic wash on canvas. 7 5/8 x 7 5/8.

While often compared to artists in the Modernist or Minimalist canon, Judge's soulful, delicate works in pigment have frequently looped in notions of primitivism. Her implementation of spolvero, a centuries-old technique wherein pigmented dust is sifted through small holes in paper or onto a hard stone surface, seems to reinforce this idea, and many of her works, after all, could be described as murals.

Mary Judge, Wall Painting, dry pigment. 11 feet (dimensions vary)

This last feature seems to put Judge close to many seminal figures in postminimalism. With Eva Hesse or Richard Tuttle, Judge has in common not only the practice of working  directly on walls, but also with imbuing modular, geometric shapes with the fallibility of a human hand and the nuanced effect of chance. The way powdered pigment falls just barely outside the contours of a few, sharp lines, one sees in these works of Judge's an effort to work out a few simple, formal ideas of proportion and harmony on the paper or wall and imbue the resulting shapes with a soft-spoken, meditative quality and an inescapable sense of intimacy and warmth.

Storefront Gallery is on 16 Wilson Ave., near the Morgan Ave. stop on the L train. Useful information about participating galleries that will be open late tomorrow is available here.