Judith Lipton, born in Shanghai, China, is a contemporary American artist based in New York City who for the past 40 years has developed series of works in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and installation. The artist uses materials and forms that evoke fragility and tangibility, while referencing the body directly and indirectly. Her primarily abstract work explores themes of loss and employs forms resembling human torsos and limbs, as well as book pages, scrolls and other forms evocative of embodiment.
Lipton evokes a timeless paradox of ephemerality in her most recent and ongoing installation, Force-None (2007, 2015), which confronts the viewer with the experience of loss through the fragile and emptied out interiors of cracked eggshells. She provokes the spectator with the tension between the fragility of life bound up with the inevitability of destruction and waste.
The elusiveness of past experience is presented as a thematic preoccupation in Lipton’s wall sculptures, Cycladic Cycle (2001-3), in which she manipulates the canonical, female folded-figure of the Greek Islands, Cyclades (2800-2300 BC). Little is known about the history of these mysterious totemic figures and Lipton erupts their elemental forms with layers of copper, linen, paint and paper to suggest hidden meanings of the past.
In her stunning series of white monochromatic wall sculptures, I and Thou (1995-98), Lipton engages the question of the ethereal in her use of rough-hewn and refined mixed media such as burlap, encrusted shards, crumbled canvases, gold leaf and rice paper that she collages and inserts into openings of her shaped canvases inspired by the Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber.
Her pared down yet expressive, abstract Black and White Drawings (2001) create a strong sense of tension and mystery in their repetitive attack of the paper with black charcoal. The imagery which first appears cool and compositionally complex quickly gives way to pure forms that reference the spiritual.
Lipton’s work has been exhibited at The Katonah Museum, Katonah, NY; Broadway Windows, New York University; Denise Bibro Fine Art, New York, NY; The John Slade Ely House, New Haven, CT; Silvermine Guild for the Arts, New Canaan, CT; La Mama La Galleria, New York, NY; The Westport Arts Center, Westport, CT.
Recognized for her talent as a youngster, Lipton attended the prestigious High School of Music and Art in New York City, earned her B.A. at Queens College, and holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College.
Judith Lipton Art 