Early Work/Minimal (1965-73)

At the beginning of her professional career, Chicago created a significant body of minimal art which, for a long time, remained unknown even though her work had been included in the influential 1965 exhibition, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York. In 2002, several of her pieces were featured in A Minimal Future at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This show stimulated a new interest in Chicago’s early work and in 2004, a major survey of her minimal work was exhibited at the LewAllen Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.
In the accompanying catalogue, Jenni Sorkin, curator of the exhibition, wrote:

“While Judy Chicago is best known as a pioneering feminist artist, the first decade of her artistic production is among the most complex, interesting, and unknown periods of her career. From 1965 to 1973, she created drawings, paintings, and sculpture that demonstrated her affinity for exploring color through a very reduced formal vocabulary of geometric shapes… For Chicago, minimalism was more than a phase, it was a formative approach the artist integrated into her later work. The seemingly dramatic shift and direction of her work after 1973 is not at all as discordant as it appears; rather, it was a gradual process which is easily illuminated and traced through the development of the work made between 1965 and 1973. Prior to developing the lexicon of vaginal or ‘core’ imagery that was to occupy her for most of the 1970 s, Chicago’s content was about testing the limits of color through self-designed diagrams, systems and spatial patterning… Chicago’s production during the late 1960s and early 1970s represents a passionate and original pursuit of the experiential nature of color, transformation, and visual perception”.

Selected work

Early Work/Minimal 11845_Feather_Room Early Work/Minimal 09 Feather Room DSC05643 Early Work/Minimal Zig Zag Early Work/Minimal Sunset Squares Early Work/Minimal 10 Part Cylinders Early Work/Minimal 10288_Trinity Early Work/Minimal 10289_Rainbow_Pickett_3 Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal 003 10478 Bigamy Repainted 2017 front (35mm) Early Work/Minimal 008 11718 Mother Superette copy Early Work/Minimal Car Hood Early Work/Minimal Birth Hood Early Work/Minimal Bigamy Hood Early Work/Minimal Flight Hood Early Work/Minimal Flash Back Early Work/Minimal Flash Back, version 2 Early Work/Minimal 3.5.5 Acrylic Shapes Early Work/Minimal Aluminum Rearrangeable Game Board Early Work/Minimal Cubes and Cylinders Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal Bronze Domes Early Work/Minimal Pastel Domes #1 Early Work/Minimal Clear Domes on Dark Base Early Work/Minimal Dome Drawing Early Work/Minimal Dome Drawing (Orange, Yellow, Green) Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal Donut Drawing #5 Early Work/Minimal Optical Shapes #10 Early Work/Minimal 10390_Pasadena_Lifesavers_Red_Series_#2 Early Work/Minimal 10392_Pasadena_Lifesavers_Blue_Series_#2 Early Work/Minimal 10416_Flesh_Fan Early Work/Minimal 10419_Morning_Fan Early Work/Minimal 10420_Evening_Fan Early Work/Minimal 10364_Big_Blue_Pink Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal Desert Fan

Installation views

Early Work/Minimal Judy_Chicago_with_Game_Board Early Work/Minimal JC_with_Zig_Zag_Trinity_ca1965 Early Work/Minimal JC_10_Part_Cylinders Early Work/Minimal 11514_10_Part_Cylinders_in_Process Early Work/Minimal JC LA Jeffreyy Deitch 2019 Judy with 10 Part Cylinder Early Work/Minimal JC LA Jeffrey Deitch 2019 Trinity Early Work/Minimal Rainbow_Pickett_&_Trinity Early Work/Minimal Chicago in LA Early Work/Minimal Zig Zag at Nina Johnson Early Work/Minimal Sunset Squares at Jessica Silverman Early Work/Minimal Judy Chicago A Retrospective installed at the de Young Museum Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal Flesh Fat at MANA Early Work/Minimal MANA_JudyChicago_006 Early Work/Minimal SONY DSC Early Work/Minimal Judy Chicago at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami)

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