Crepuscolo, 2025
Oil on canvas
84 ¼ × 92 inches (214 × 233.7 cm)
GRAY is pleased to present Judy Ledgerwood: Twilight in the Wilderness, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the artist. Opening at GRAY New York on September 10, 2025, Twilight in the Wilderness debuts four large-scale canvases that continue Ledgerwood’s career-long exploration of radiant color and architectural scale through a feminist reworking of the painterly grid.
For over forty years, Judy Ledgerwood has pushed the boundaries of abstraction. Her chromatic language subverts and reimagines historically male-dominated traditions of Color Field painting and Minimalism, transforming visual pleasure into a critical investigation of beauty and representation. Her large scale paintings often appear like textiles, pinned from the top and painted edge-to-edge, and feature repeating quatrefoil patterns rendered with intentional irregularity. These immersive, optically charged compositions envelop the viewer, turning the act of looking into a fully embodied experience of beauty, color, and space. “For me,” Ledgerwood states, “the painting happens between the painting and the viewer.”
Vitamin C, 2025
Oil on canvas
90 × 144 inches (228.6 × 365.8 cm)
Titled after Frederic Edwin Church’s 1860 painting of a sunset, Twilight in the Wilderness presents four new paintings inspired by the drama and color of refracted light just before nightfall. Monumental in scale, these works blaze with hot pinks, golden yellows, burnt oranges, teals, and vivid greens—colors that heighten the works’ radiance and emotional intensity. Of the largest canvas Vitamin C, art historian and curator Helen Molesworth writes: “A riot of tangled paint strokes, a filigreed layer of beachfront-hotel seafoam on top of an Orange Julius® ground? Whatever grid once held the substrate together has gone all akimbo.”
This new body of work, presented in her first New York exhibition with GRAY, both continues and deepens Ledgerwood’s lifelong pursuit of expanding the possibilities of painting—inviting viewers into an immersive chromatic encounter that is at once disarming and dazzling.
Twilight in the Wilderness, 1860. Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826–1900). Oil on canvas; framed: 124 x 185 x 13 cm (48 13/16 x 72 13/16 x 5 1/8 in.); unframed: 101.6 x 162.6 cm (40 x 64 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1965.233
“I’ve been obsessed with the color orange lately. In part because I’m attracted to the cast color that fills the space around any orange object, and also because the various interpretations of the color’s meanings are so at odds with one another. In orange we have the warm glow of the setting sun, traffic hazard cones, the second highest risk alert for terrorist acts, orange juice, Circus Peanuts, Creamsicles, Cheetos, Cheez Doodles, Cheez-Its, and Kraft Mac and Cheese. Zicam Rapid Melts, goldfish, Garfield, and the saffron robes of Buddhist monks. Papayas, mangoes, and many varieties of squash and carrots are all composed of the reddish-yellow hue. Oil of orange wards off illness, increases energy and uplifts mood. Orange is optimism and cautionary. Orange is a color for our time.
Obsession with the color orange led me to create the enveloping glow of the setting sun in an installation of paintings. For me, the greatest sunset painting is from 1860, when the United States was building up to a bitter conflict. Titled Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church, it gives the title to my first exhibition at GRAY.” —Judy Ledgerwood
Folded Tangerine & Mint, 2024
Acrylic gouache on Twinrocker paper
14 × 14 inches (35.6 × 35.6 cm)
Photo: Chris Strong
Since the 1980s, Judy Ledgerwood has confronted and expanded the history of abstract painting by decentering perceptions of its neutrality and prioritizing visual engagement and pleasure. Drawing upon rich and diverse sources from the realms of both fine art and popular culture, Ledgerwood’s optically bold, large-scale canvases engage viewers in active looking and challenge conventional notions of beauty and taste.
Early in her career, she embraced traditionally feminine colors like pastels, pinks, and fluorescent hues to undermine the male-dominated milieu of abstract painting, and she continues to explore light, color, and structure with great specificity. Through repetitive circular shapes and her signature quatrefoil pattern, Ledgerwood bends and relaxes the grid, bringing influences from the Pattern and Decoration movement, quilting, and textiles into the arena of her paintings. Ledgerwood’s work includes an exploration of architectural spaces through her creation of monumental wall paintings and environmental installations at the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and a Paris Metro station, among other venues.
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATION
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by HOUR, featuring an essay by art historian Helen Molesworth and an introduction by the artist.
