Cliff and Cleft
28 Sep – 22 Dec 2024
Gathering, Ibiza

Exhibition Text by Emily Steer

Harminder Judge creates richly energetic work. Vibrant, wall-based plaster and pigment pieces explode out from a central line; others look as though they could suck everything around them into a formidable void. From floor-based installations to hefty works that at first appear akin to paintings, each contains a magnetic sense of life and movement, drawing the viewer into a dynamic relationship.

For Cliff and Cleft at Gathering, Judge returns to his characteristically frenetic eruptions of colour. This follows A Ghost Dance, his recent, black-drenched dual exhibition at Matt’s Gallery and the Sunday Painter in London, which drew upon traditional funeral rites and spiritual processions. In Cliff and Cleft, three large,two-panel works hang on the walls, with effervescent bursts of green, pink and black snaking across them. The artist enjoys a naïve, joyful relationship with colour, working quickly and instinctively to apply primary pigments to wet plaster, with the final results falling outside of his control. Through this process, he searches for a sense of internal harmony, using elemental colours to stira powerful emotional response. Once the plaster has set, these pieces are meticulously polished, embedding the pigment within them. It is as though the colour becomes part of the material, rather than having been applied to the surface, imbuing the works with asculptural rather than simply painterly presence.

Within these large, energetic pieces, there are also moments of intense darkness, suggestive of a vacuum or third dimension that the viewer might be able to tentatively enter. Three smaller monochrome works further evoke this somewhat supernatural force. These intimately scaled pieces contain potent blasts of energy, conjuring an infinite depth which belies their simple colour palette. Judge has long combined the stirring techniques of contemporary art movements such as abstract expressionism with the spiritual potency of transcendental and neo-tantric painting. Plaster and colour become more than the sum of their parts in Judge’s pieces, moving beyond the realm of artwork and becoming objects with their own dynamic life. While specific rituals and traditions often feed into Judge’s exhibitions in the form of performance, at Gathering, these pieces are presented devoid of narrative, inviting open interpretation.

Cliff and Cleft also features two new sculptural works. Untitled (rock risen cleft cliff) almost covers the floor of the top mezzanine level. It is craggy and organic in shape, appearing like a natural slab of rock, though formed from the same plaster as Judge’s wall-hung pieces. A five-centimetre gap divides the work and the walls, rendering it in an in-between state, as both a walkable floor surface and independent sculpture. Likewise, Judge’s mercurial treatment of his material throughout the exhibition reflects upon the alchemical potential of many items in this world – including the human body. This connects with Judge’s ongoing interests in the transition of the body from it physical fleshy form into ash upon death and ceremonial burning. Untitled (rock risen cleft) is a tall sculpture which reflects upon the coffin-like piece originally shown in Judge’s Sunday Painter installation. This new work stands on one end, with a thick line traversing its length from top to bottom. It is totemic in feel, carved symmetrically on either side of the dividing line, mirroring the centre point that runs through his larger wall-hung works. This piece could be read as bodily in its shape and form, while also veering between the appearance of natural rock, paleolithic carving, and pagan figure.

Judge intentionally keeps his work slippery. It moves with ease from suggestions of human-made to natural origin; sculpture to painting; artistic to spiritual roots. He embraces the untethered nature of abstraction, evoking an abundant range of feelings and connections depending upon the viewer’s own background and experience. In front of these pieces – or indeed while walking upon Untitled (rock risen cleft cliff) – the visitor’s personal history becomes important, given space to make their own connections, as the artist himself revels in the ineffable and intangible potential of his materials.

Sea and Stone and Rib and Bone
9 Nov - 23 Dec 2023
Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

Exhibition Essay by Susanna Davies-Crook available here

Sea and Stone and Rib and Bone
9 Nov - 23 Dec 2023
Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

Exhibition Essay by Susanna Davies-Crook available here

A Ghost Dance
24 May - 14 July 2024
A collaborative exhibition between The Sunday Painter & Matt’s Gallery, London
Accompanied by an Essay by Susanna Davies-Crook available here

Harminder Judge’s A Ghost Dance is a single exhibition of new work across both Matt’s Gallery and The Sunday Painter in South London. Located just 10 minutes walk from each other, the two spaces are pleased to present an exhibition in two parts. The galleries have worked collaboratively to help Judge realise a new body of work that brings the artist’s wall-based plaster pieces into dialogue with new developments with free standing and floor-based sculptures.

A Ghost Dance references funeral rites, processions and the presence of ghosts and spirits. It draws on persistent themes in Judge’s work: life, death, ritual and rebirth, creating parallels between the deconstructed body and the cosmos. Judge is preoccupied with physical and spiritual transformation - a body becoming ash, material becoming immaterial, the physical becoming metaphysical. The show revisits early elements of his practice, extends recent developments in his work, and opens up new areas of exploration. His work sets into motion dialogues between Western Modernism, Indian Neo Tantric painting, American Transcendental painting and familial funeral traditions drawn from rural Punjab.

The 'Ghost Dance' of the title refers to a Native American ceremony. This type of circle dance was practised to raise the spirits of the dead in order for them to fight alongside the living to reclaim land from colonial settlers. Over recent years, Judge has developed a distinctive and innovative practice grounded in an extended exploration of pigmented plaster as an artistic medium. The plaster sets – freezing a record of its creation in time – the surface is worked, polished and slowly worn away to reveal layers of colour, texture and movement beneath. This process embraces chance, and over time he has pushed it further with each new work. The results are sensual and seductive, with surfaces appearing sleek and shimmering. They have an illusory quality, seeming to hover in front of the wall, suggesting depth, evoking the idea of a portal or doorway and inviting the viewer to stay with them in contemplation.

For Matt’s Gallery, Judge will work at scale, developing a monumental, enveloping expanse of material, pigment and colour for the space and setting this into dialogue with new discreet, floor-based semi-figurative works redolent of funereal urns or totems. For The Sunday Painter, Judge will combine new works on a smaller scale with a like new cadaver-like sculpture devised for their space. A processional performance between the two spaces will take place on the opening night, recalling early performance works by the artist.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by writer and curator Susanna Davies-Crook, building on her previous text 'Spectres and Portals: The Work of Harminder Judge', produced for the artist’s debut solo show in India at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai in 2023. As part of London Gallery Weekend, Judge will be in conversation with Davies-Crook on Saturday June 1st at Matt's Gallery to discuss the two-part exhibition. The talk will cover a spectrum of topics including belief, ritual, consciousness, material process, matter, and abstraction.

A Ghost Dance
24 May - 14 July 2024
A collaborative exhibition between The Sunday Painter & Matt’s Gallery, London
Accompanied by an Essay by Susanna Davies-Crook available here

Harminder Judge’s A Ghost Dance is a single exhibition of new work across both Matt’s Gallery and The Sunday Painter in South London. Located just 10 minutes walk from each other, the two spaces are pleased to present an exhibition in two parts. The galleries have worked collaboratively to help Judge realise a new body of work that brings the artist’s wall-based plaster pieces into dialogue with new developments with free standing and floor-based sculptures.

A Ghost Dance references funeral rites, processions and the presence of ghosts and spirits. It draws on persistent themes in Judge’s work: life, death, ritual and rebirth, creating parallels between the deconstructed body and the cosmos. Judge is preoccupied with physical and spiritual transformation - a body becoming ash, material becoming immaterial, the physical becoming metaphysical. The show revisits early elements of his practice, extends recent developments in his work, and opens up new areas of exploration. His work sets into motion dialogues between Western Modernism, Indian Neo Tantric painting, American Transcendental painting and familial funeral traditions drawn from rural Punjab.

The 'Ghost Dance' of the title refers to a Native American ceremony. This type of circle dance was practised to raise the spirits of the dead in order for them to fight alongside the living to reclaim land from colonial settlers. Over recent years, Judge has developed a distinctive and innovative practice grounded in an extended exploration of pigmented plaster as an artistic medium. The plaster sets – freezing a record of its creation in time – the surface is worked, polished and slowly worn away to reveal layers of colour, texture and movement beneath. This process embraces chance, and over time he has pushed it further with each new work. The results are sensual and seductive, with surfaces appearing sleek and shimmering. They have an illusory quality, seeming to hover in front of the wall, suggesting depth, evoking the idea of a portal or doorway and inviting the viewer to stay with them in contemplation.

For Matt’s Gallery, Judge will work at scale, developing a monumental, enveloping expanse of material, pigment and colour for the space and setting this into dialogue with new discreet, floor-based semi-figurative works redolent of funereal urns or totems. For The Sunday Painter, Judge will combine new works on a smaller scale with a like new cadaver-like sculpture devised for their space. A processional performance between the two spaces will take place on the opening night, recalling early performance works by the artist.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by writer and curator Susanna Davies-Crook, building on her previous text 'Spectres and Portals: The Work of Harminder Judge', produced for the artist’s debut solo show in India at Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai in 2023. As part of London Gallery Weekend, Judge will be in conversation with Davies-Crook on Saturday June 1st at Matt's Gallery to discuss the two-part exhibition. The talk will cover a spectrum of topics including belief, ritual, consciousness, material process, matter, and abstraction.

The Reason for Painting
4 May – 25 Jun 2023
Mead Gallery, Coventry

The Art Riot Collective, Betsy Bradley, James Collins, Pam Evelyn, Jadé Fadojutimi, Rachel Jones, Harminder Judge, Melike Kara, Rob Lyon, Oscar Murillo, Ruairiadh O’Connell, Francis Offman, Mary Ramsden and Sam Windett.

The Reason for Painting continues the Mead Gallery’s longstanding examination of abstract painting. It builds on previous Mead exhibitions including: Slow Burn (1998), Slipping Abstraction (2007), The Indiscipline of Painting (2012) and Kaleidoscope (2017). The exhibition also profiles a diverse group of younger artists that came together through their experience of using colour and paint, to experiment and consider the world in which we live today.

The exhibition took inspiration from The University of Warwick’s founding art collection, which was shaped by two informed collectors of art. The University’s architect, Eugene Rosenberg and the building contractor, Alistair McAlpine, who took interest in young artists who were developing international critical acclaim in the field of abstraction, including Jack Bush, Gene Davis and Patrick Heron.

Returning to The Reason for Painting Exhibition itself, the featured artists make work that is rooted in the everyday, including ineffable feelings and emotions, daily conversations and transactions, crossing borders, our local environments, spiritualism, cultural heritage, and routine—making the case that abstract painting and lived experience are inherently intertwined.

The Reason for Painting
4 May – 25 Jun 2023
Mead Gallery, Coventry

The Art Riot Collective, Betsy Bradley, James Collins, Pam Evelyn, Jadé Fadojutimi, Rachel Jones, Harminder Judge, Melike Kara, Rob Lyon, Oscar Murillo, Ruairiadh O’Connell, Francis Offman, Mary Ramsden and Sam Windett.

The Reason for Painting continues the Mead Gallery’s longstanding examination of abstract painting. It builds on previous Mead exhibitions including: Slow Burn (1998), Slipping Abstraction (2007), The Indiscipline of Painting (2012) and Kaleidoscope (2017). The exhibition also profiles a diverse group of younger artists that came together through their experience of using colour and paint, to experiment and consider the world in which we live today.

The exhibition took inspiration from The University of Warwick’s founding art collection, which was shaped by two informed collectors of art. The University’s architect, Eugene Rosenberg and the building contractor, Alistair McAlpine, who took interest in young artists who were developing international critical acclaim in the field of abstraction, including Jack Bush, Gene Davis and Patrick Heron.

Returning to The Reason for Painting Exhibition itself, the featured artists make work that is rooted in the everyday, including ineffable feelings and emotions, daily conversations and transactions, crossing borders, our local environments, spiritualism, cultural heritage, and routine—making the case that abstract painting and lived experience are inherently intertwined.

At home in the universe
20 Jul - 7 Sep 2019
Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

Harminder Judge and Mahirwan Mamtani

Exhibition Essay by Rebecca Heald

AING, AING is Thy favourite mantra,
Thou who art both form and formlessness,
Who art the wealth of the lotus face of the lotus-born,
Embodiment of all gunas, yet devoid of attributes,
Changeless, and neither gross nor subtle.

None know Thy nature, nor is Thy innerreality known.
Thou art the whole universe;
And Thou it is who existeth within it.
Thou art saluted by the foremost of Devas.
Without part Thou existeth in Thy fulness everywhere.
Ever pure art Thou.

––Sarasvatistotra (Tantrasara)

For those attuned to it, in recent years Tantra as an idea and a way of being in the world has been steadily gaining currency in contemporary artistic practice. Insofar as it is possible to offer a crystalised definition of it, Tantra is a term used to describe ways of connecting with the cosmos, the micro to macro.

In the sphere of art, Tantra was propagated in the west by curator and collector Ajit Mookerjee from the early 1960s onwards. Mookerjee claimed Tantra’s ultimate aim was the attainment of ‘a state of perfect bliss’. Through exhibitions including Philip Rawson’s seminal 1971 Tantra at the Hayward Gallery in London, many artists began to engage with as well as collect and live with tantric artefacts. There is still much study to be done on revising the dominant art histories so that they pay proper tribute to the influence of other cultures and traditions, including of Tantra on modernism and minimalism. In the meantime, it is important to acknowledge that these histories exist, as well as perhaps to contemplate the assertion of psychoanalyst Carl Jung that there are universal patterns and images that are part of a collective unconscious operating across cultures and time.

This exhibition brings together the work of two artists, Mahirwan Mamtani and Harminder Judge. Separated by generations and geographies, they are united in a declared interest in Tantra, and upon first encounter their work might also appear to share aesthetic qualities. Yet further looking and learning reveals definite differences. Mamtani’s work remains closely visually aligned to the schematics of Mandalas; Judge’s work is more open with swathes of unadorned space, it is less directive. The works are about what we have in common with the universe, as well as who we are as individuals and how we find our place in it, our home.

Mamtani was born in 1935 in present-day Sindh province, Pakistan, and fled partition with his family to settle in Delhi. He taught himself to paint while lying on his sickbed in a refugee camp, a fact recounted in his exuberantly lively biography, Indus to Isar. Like many Sindhis who were uprooted to India during partition, he fell into a cycle of odd jobs, but he nevertheless found time to nurture his passion for art and making. Initially studying at the Delhi Polytechnic, in 1966 he won an opportunity to study in Munich, Germany. In Germany, Mamtani immersed himself in the culture and the art scene. He succinctly articulates how what he saw enabled him to determine his own visual vocabulary:

I saw many exhibitions of Mondrian, Malevitch [sic], Josef Albers [...]–they all had a geometrical approach. It connected me to Indian Tantra art, the book published by Ajeet Mukherjee [sic] in the early 1960s. I started experimenting with the geometrical Mandala form, and then ultimately four-petal circles construction became my symbol of expression. For me it represented wholeness.

Through his identification and engagement with Constructivism, Mamtani developed ‘Centrovision’ based on an ‘impulse to transform my experience of the world into a vision leading to the bindu. This point at the beginning and end of the inner and outer space, where the micro-macro unity is present.’ The soft, gradated hues of his paintings contain and channel movement across the surfaces of the orderly and distinct sections. Although he has made their shapes and symbols his own, the diagrammatic forms of the Mandala are never left behind. These works speak of transformation and the potential to explore alternative dimensions, but they are also intensely personal. For Mamtani, a viewer will make of them what they will. Mamtani has in his possession almost 3,000 of his own artworks, which constitute a kind of diary documenting his transcendental relationship to art.

The works by Mamtani gathered together for this exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary are from the Neo-Tantric period of the mid- to late-1980s. A term invented on the occasion of the exhibition Neo-Tantra: Contemporary Indian Art Inspired by Tradition at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1985, that included Mamtani alongside Biren De, GR Santosh, Sohan Qadri and others. One of the curators, LP Sihare, at the time the director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, described it as ‘art [that] is not tantra but related to it, coming out of it in some way’. Here Mamtani’s paintings are seen alongside works by Judge for whom Tantra might not have been such an explicit part of his cultural upbringing and something that he could draw on directly, but rather a set of ideas and energies for which he has more recently developed a profound appreciation.

Originally from the north of England, Judge is currently enrolled at the prestigious Royal Academy Schools in London. On the wall of his studio he has scrawled an eclectic set of quotes by the philosophers Democritus and Ludwig Wittgenstein and one from the artist Francis Bacon that reads: ‘I want a deeply ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.’ Originally trained as a painter, to make his current body of work he has developed a ritualised process over which he has tight control, apart, crucially, from when it comes to the visual composition of the main, ‘front’ area.

Using knowledge of materials acquired when building a house on the edge of the Peak District (part of a strategic determination to make money in a time of economic gloom), and with allusion to Renaissance frescos and Indian reverse glass painting, he has devised an alchemical process whereby plaster, polymer and pigment are combined and shaped into a low-lying, elongated oval. Once dry, the works are turned over to reveal the workings of the pigment.

When the surface has been revealed, Judge fastidiously sands, waxes and oils them. If you did not know how these works were made, you might assume they were cross-sections of unfathomably large precious stones, or even imagine them to be experiments in photography. Sometimes psychedelic swirls appear; sometimes landscapes; sometimes they are reminiscent of dyed fabric; sometimes they are like a heat-haze. Their oval shape suggests Shiva lingas and the Brahmanda (the cosmic egg). Symbolic of the god Shiva, the divinity without form, the source of the universe, the infinite into which everything merges at the end of time, lingams are understood to be man-made for worship, carved from stone, but can also be found in nature. Here they are emerging through Judge’s controlled process. He himself likens them to Tantric works on paper by anonymous modern painters from Rajasthan. They share not only a similar form but often are also characterised by flecked and bleeding pigments.

Judge's titles for this exhibition all relate to the night of his great-uncle's funeral. Writing evocatively about his encounter with death and a great-uncle he had met just once before, he describes how ‘[the body] burned throughout the night, and he slept there, next to the fire, next to his father. [...] In the morning he woke next to his father and they sieved through the ashes, chunks of bone and teeth and steel jewellery.’6 Using the third person to talk about what happened, Judge takes a hold of reality and transforms it into a myth worth living for. 

Mamtani and Judge maintain distinct, highly original practices that draw on Tantric doctrines and aesthetics. In interviews, Mamtani has quoted Goethe’s ‘everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home’ and he has written ‘Since 1948 after I left my native place Sindh on river Indus, I have lost the feeling for my home’. Judge’s material process is born of building a house he will never live in, and his current work is guided by a singular experience at the funeral pyre of his great-uncle, which he attended just hours after stepping off an aeroplane. For both artists their relationship to Tantra is as much about the individual as it is the universal. It also affords them a tool with which to confront questions of displacement, as well as ways to connect with an ancestral home.

At home in the universe
20 Jul - 7 Sep 2019
Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai

Harminder Judge and Mahirwan Mamtani

Exhibition Essay by Rebecca Heald

AING, AING is Thy favourite mantra,
Thou who art both form and formlessness,
Who art the wealth of the lotus face of the lotus-born,
Embodiment of all gunas, yet devoid of attributes,
Changeless, and neither gross nor subtle.

None know Thy nature, nor is Thy innerreality known.
Thou art the whole universe;
And Thou it is who existeth within it.
Thou art saluted by the foremost of Devas.
Without part Thou existeth in Thy fulness everywhere.
Ever pure art Thou.

––Sarasvatistotra (Tantrasara)

For those attuned to it, in recent years Tantra as an idea and a way of being in the world has been steadily gaining currency in contemporary artistic practice. Insofar as it is possible to offer a crystalised definition of it, Tantra is a term used to describe ways of connecting with the cosmos, the micro to macro.

In the sphere of art, Tantra was propagated in the west by curator and collector Ajit Mookerjee from the early 1960s onwards. Mookerjee claimed Tantra’s ultimate aim was the attainment of ‘a state of perfect bliss’. Through exhibitions including Philip Rawson’s seminal 1971 Tantra at the Hayward Gallery in London, many artists began to engage with as well as collect and live with tantric artefacts. There is still much study to be done on revising the dominant art histories so that they pay proper tribute to the influence of other cultures and traditions, including of Tantra on modernism and minimalism. In the meantime, it is important to acknowledge that these histories exist, as well as perhaps to contemplate the assertion of psychoanalyst Carl Jung that there are universal patterns and images that are part of a collective unconscious operating across cultures and time.

This exhibition brings together the work of two artists, Mahirwan Mamtani and Harminder Judge. Separated by generations and geographies, they are united in a declared interest in Tantra, and upon first encounter their work might also appear to share aesthetic qualities. Yet further looking and learning reveals definite differences. Mamtani’s work remains closely visually aligned to the schematics of Mandalas; Judge’s work is more open with swathes of unadorned space, it is less directive. The works are about what we have in common with the universe, as well as who we are as individuals and how we find our place in it, our home.

Mamtani was born in 1935 in present-day Sindh province, Pakistan, and fled partition with his family to settle in Delhi. He taught himself to paint while lying on his sickbed in a refugee camp, a fact recounted in his exuberantly lively biography, Indus to Isar. Like many Sindhis who were uprooted to India during partition, he fell into a cycle of odd jobs, but he nevertheless found time to nurture his passion for art and making. Initially studying at the Delhi Polytechnic, in 1966 he won an opportunity to study in Munich, Germany. In Germany, Mamtani immersed himself in the culture and the art scene. He succinctly articulates how what he saw enabled him to determine his own visual vocabulary:

I saw many exhibitions of Mondrian, Malevitch [sic], Josef Albers [...]–they all had a geometrical approach. It connected me to Indian Tantra art, the book published by Ajeet Mukherjee [sic] in the early 1960s. I started experimenting with the geometrical Mandala form, and then ultimately four-petal circles construction became my symbol of expression. For me it represented wholeness.

Through his identification and engagement with Constructivism, Mamtani developed ‘Centrovision’ based on an ‘impulse to transform my experience of the world into a vision leading to the bindu. This point at the beginning and end of the inner and outer space, where the micro-macro unity is present.’ The soft, gradated hues of his paintings contain and channel movement across the surfaces of the orderly and distinct sections. Although he has made their shapes and symbols his own, the diagrammatic forms of the Mandala are never left behind. These works speak of transformation and the potential to explore alternative dimensions, but they are also intensely personal. For Mamtani, a viewer will make of them what they will. Mamtani has in his possession almost 3,000 of his own artworks, which constitute a kind of diary documenting his transcendental relationship to art.

The works by Mamtani gathered together for this exhibition at Jhaveri Contemporary are from the Neo-Tantric period of the mid- to late-1980s. A term invented on the occasion of the exhibition Neo-Tantra: Contemporary Indian Art Inspired by Tradition at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1985, that included Mamtani alongside Biren De, GR Santosh, Sohan Qadri and others. One of the curators, LP Sihare, at the time the director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, described it as ‘art [that] is not tantra but related to it, coming out of it in some way’. Here Mamtani’s paintings are seen alongside works by Judge for whom Tantra might not have been such an explicit part of his cultural upbringing and something that he could draw on directly, but rather a set of ideas and energies for which he has more recently developed a profound appreciation.

Originally from the north of England, Judge is currently enrolled at the prestigious Royal Academy Schools in London. On the wall of his studio he has scrawled an eclectic set of quotes by the philosophers Democritus and Ludwig Wittgenstein and one from the artist Francis Bacon that reads: ‘I want a deeply ordered image, but I want it to come about by chance.’ Originally trained as a painter, to make his current body of work he has developed a ritualised process over which he has tight control, apart, crucially, from when it comes to the visual composition of the main, ‘front’ area.

Using knowledge of materials acquired when building a house on the edge of the Peak District (part of a strategic determination to make money in a time of economic gloom), and with allusion to Renaissance frescos and Indian reverse glass painting, he has devised an alchemical process whereby plaster, polymer and pigment are combined and shaped into a low-lying, elongated oval. Once dry, the works are turned over to reveal the workings of the pigment.

When the surface has been revealed, Judge fastidiously sands, waxes and oils them. If you did not know how these works were made, you might assume they were cross-sections of unfathomably large precious stones, or even imagine them to be experiments in photography. Sometimes psychedelic swirls appear; sometimes landscapes; sometimes they are reminiscent of dyed fabric; sometimes they are like a heat-haze. Their oval shape suggests Shiva lingas and the Brahmanda (the cosmic egg). Symbolic of the god Shiva, the divinity without form, the source of the universe, the infinite into which everything merges at the end of time, lingams are understood to be man-made for worship, carved from stone, but can also be found in nature. Here they are emerging through Judge’s controlled process. He himself likens them to Tantric works on paper by anonymous modern painters from Rajasthan. They share not only a similar form but often are also characterised by flecked and bleeding pigments.

Judge's titles for this exhibition all relate to the night of his great-uncle's funeral. Writing evocatively about his encounter with death and a great-uncle he had met just once before, he describes how ‘[the body] burned throughout the night, and he slept there, next to the fire, next to his father. [...] In the morning he woke next to his father and they sieved through the ashes, chunks of bone and teeth and steel jewellery.’6 Using the third person to talk about what happened, Judge takes a hold of reality and transforms it into a myth worth living for. 

Mamtani and Judge maintain distinct, highly original practices that draw on Tantric doctrines and aesthetics. In interviews, Mamtani has quoted Goethe’s ‘everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home’ and he has written ‘Since 1948 after I left my native place Sindh on river Indus, I have lost the feeling for my home’. Judge’s material process is born of building a house he will never live in, and his current work is guided by a singular experience at the funeral pyre of his great-uncle, which he attended just hours after stepping off an aeroplane. For both artists their relationship to Tantra is as much about the individual as it is the universal. It also affords them a tool with which to confront questions of displacement, as well as ways to connect with an ancestral home.

Mountain & Mercies
21 Oct - 17 Dec 2021
galeriepcp, Paris

galeriepcp a le plaisir de vous annoncer la première exposition européenne de Harminder Judge. Judge est passé d’artiste performeur à faiseur d’objet en apprenant à re-construire une maison. De même que bâtir une maison consiste en une suite de petits travaux, il crée ses œuvres faites de plâtre, polymères et pigments à travers de multiples travaux de construction, superposition, pigmentation, ponçage, renforcement et polissage. Ces processus donnent vie aux œuvres, se situant alors sur la frontière étroite entre une sensibilité matérielle raffinée et une expérience plus grande que nature, voire cosmique, qui déroute.
Quand je plonge mon regard dans ces objets tantriques, je comprends combien les ténus fragments de coïncidence matérielle contiennent le grand œuvre dans son entier, tandis que des formes compactes émanent d’œuvres plus vastes. Judge les décrit comme des portails, et si vous leur accordez assez de votre temps, elles peuvent révéler une expérience au-delà de notre étroite perception de la réalité.

galeriepcp is pleased to announce the first European exhibition from Harminder Judge. Judge transitioned from a performance artist to an object maker by learning how to re-build a house. In the same way constructing a house comprises of a series of small labours, he creates his works made of plaster, polymers, and pigments through the many labours of constructing, layering, pigmenting, sanding, strengthening and polishing. These processes give life to the pieces, existing upon the thin line between a polished material sensibility and a larger-than-life, even cosmic, perplexing experience.
When I gaze into these tantric objects, I understand how the tiny fragments of material happenstance contain the entire extended works, while compact forms arise from the larger pieces. Judge describes these pieces as portals, and if you give them time enough they can reveal an experience beyond our narrow perception of reality.

Glossary
8 Sep - 14 Oct 2023
Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna
Curated By Sacha Craddock

Exhibition Essay by Sacha Craddock

It is impossible to be neutral in politics and yet neutrality, the theme of this years Curated by, could be seen as a welcome space in which to embrace the non-functional nature of art.  It is hoped that such a metaphorically extended space and time dilutes any simplistic idea of understanding, that the narrative of artistic intention does not trump experience to determine how things really are or will be. A show consisting of work by four artists, will inevitably, carry a three-dimensional sense of discovery and surprise about it. No description can encapsulate the complicated, perhaps contradictory, power of experience.  While neutrality can never, in its abstraction, provide real vision or result, the range of physical language used by the four selected artists is able to provide a sweep of desire and aesthetics, a true range of physical endeavour and reference, that will unwittingly absorb the neutral in some other way. Much of work by the selected artists arrives out of a metaphorical sideways shift, out of a use of material that reflects the beginning of possibility and the fact that at some sort of level we, as audience and artist alike, begin in the same place. 

Andreas Reiter Raabe makes painting and sculpture that arrives out off a sort of hands-off process. With the machinery of production existing somewhere between the artist and the result, Reiter Raabe allows, somehow apparently with little emotion, the paint to fall on the canvas in smears, blops and plops. The sifting process which has already taken the mark away from the hand uses a touch that in its own terms neither succeeds nor fails, but that is, to a certain extent, determined by a language that surrounds the success and failure of abstract painting. It is also one that can be judged by different criteria.  Is this a ‘good one’, both artist and expectant observer enquire, is it lovely, what does that mean? Reiter Raabe’s process mimics the early days of a printing press; the production of and laying out of written and visual language that is neither basic nor primary, but in this case with a palette that looks if it has already been mixed in another life. The machinery of production in turn mimics a cottage industry of constructed rationale where paint, tired rather than fresh, arrives in a roundabout way and ends up, propped, hung on the wall, a slice of horizontal brought flat. When also making a flat surface stand up on its own, Reiter Raabe’s works both mimics and becomes a sculpture.

Jessica Warboys’ paintings are a result of the harnessing of the independent force of nature, in that they are made mainly by placing canvas in the sea. Direction, hands free, is never just one way, as the visual result and surrounding narrative dissolves a rhythm of autonomous and independent logic. The result, anything but pictorial or determined, manages to convey a sense of diffuse powerlessness. It is a matter of throwing yourself in, metaphorically, as the vison appears, against a sub plot of expectation about what a painting should actually do. A production of non-centralised, all-over activity; the movement of water, like that harnessed for electricity, brings about a mass of image shown roughly across a structure.

Her films follow a similar sense. Warboys’ brings image in and out of focus and associative relief using text, scratch, picture of place and, a broken, but directed, mixture of sharp and blunt, diffuse, and concentrated association and disassociation. The film makes an unusual sweep or swoop between the physical and representational, and back again. The relation between real time and moving image is fascinating. The water moves over the surface of the sea paintings, and the imagery in the moving image also seems to have a nature of its own. Warboys’ edits with precision, yet the logic of the beat and rationale of captured place, symbolic moment, associative significance allows a sweep of interference across the work. The implication is of an artist affected by, rather than affecting, the result. Such collaging is not new, of course, but the relation to time, the fact that there is no narrative, as such, creates a quickening in shift, from general to specific, totality to particularity, to extend territory and a sense of possibility. The fact the artist makes something last over time extends a form of conscious unconsciousness. 

Made in a sort of ‘hands free’ manner the somewhat belligerent iconographic paintings by Harminder Judge, are as much a matter of relief as paint. As with the work of Reiter Raabe and Warboys, with imagery, in Judge’s case a splattering, or mass, of pigment suspended within its own physical volume, a swarm of flies caught in aspic, in an apparently indirect manner. The subject and direction is petrified within a build-up of material and the work functions in a back to front manner, with the work reflecting gestural movement. The iconic, shift, rivulet of action, put in from behind or on top, arrives fixed and finite and front of stage, as it were, with hard surface, and diffuse action held still. The gesture is suspended, frozen in time, when turned from upside down and around to face us.  So, like the director of an opera, the artist achieves total revelation only after the curtain has lifted at the dress rehearsal. Made up of many gestures and moments, after copious process and care, the instant breath or cross section of reaction is revealed with colour making up an image delivered all at once. Works by Judge allude to the gesture of expressionism but also to a statement that comes, perhaps, from elsewhere. Loose powdery material leaves a trace, like a script or language of painterly ambition. Like Reiter Raabe, who paints from above, neither artist is in a position to stand back, as it were, and choose what they have made. With trust in the process, something has landed.

The action somehow in Tereza Červeňová’s photographs, is held still. They are about, or of, a decision to allow layers of actuality to be caught across the surface; a sort of dive into space brought up to flatness. So much is going on off the side, of course, elsewhere, and everywhere. Or perhaps nothing is happening anywhere, that can have visual, formal, even aesthetic significance till held, not so much still, but as an example of place, space, and insignificant continuity. While the artists in the show have a roundabout, back to front, approach to a subsequent result, Červeňová’s photographs arrive in differing size and scale as perhaps stripping observation, to be shared, understood and appreciated in part for the continuation of the Modernist dream about the observation of elements, cut out ,collaged into consciousness. The loveliness of the disturbed flat sheet, a wall, the reflection in a window; really anything that brings the smear, tear, crumple, layered levels of visual language together. Červeňová’s photographs take on a role that washes up and away an exact sense of direction and subject, in order to remain in the role they play. The photograph, in this case mimics the whoosh of the chemical that in real life washes across the surface of photographic paper, and so with production mimicking the subject, form and content meet in the middle to become not just a self-defining image but a page holder as it were, in the relationship between art and photograph.

Glossary
8 Sep - 14 Oct 2023
Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna
Curated By Sacha Craddock

Exhibition Essay by Sacha Craddock

It is impossible to be neutral in politics and yet neutrality, the theme of this years Curated by, could be seen as a welcome space in which to embrace the non-functional nature of art.  It is hoped that such a metaphorically extended space and time dilutes any simplistic idea of understanding, that the narrative of artistic intention does not trump experience to determine how things really are or will be. A show consisting of work by four artists, will inevitably, carry a three-dimensional sense of discovery and surprise about it. No description can encapsulate the complicated, perhaps contradictory, power of experience.  While neutrality can never, in its abstraction, provide real vision or result, the range of physical language used by the four selected artists is able to provide a sweep of desire and aesthetics, a true range of physical endeavour and reference, that will unwittingly absorb the neutral in some other way. Much of work by the selected artists arrives out of a metaphorical sideways shift, out of a use of material that reflects the beginning of possibility and the fact that at some sort of level we, as audience and artist alike, begin in the same place. 

Andreas Reiter Raabe makes painting and sculpture that arrives out off a sort of hands-off process. With the machinery of production existing somewhere between the artist and the result, Reiter Raabe allows, somehow apparently with little emotion, the paint to fall on the canvas in smears, blops and plops. The sifting process which has already taken the mark away from the hand uses a touch that in its own terms neither succeeds nor fails, but that is, to a certain extent, determined by a language that surrounds the success and failure of abstract painting. It is also one that can be judged by different criteria.  Is this a ‘good one’, both artist and expectant observer enquire, is it lovely, what does that mean? Reiter Raabe’s process mimics the early days of a printing press; the production of and laying out of written and visual language that is neither basic nor primary, but in this case with a palette that looks if it has already been mixed in another life. The machinery of production in turn mimics a cottage industry of constructed rationale where paint, tired rather than fresh, arrives in a roundabout way and ends up, propped, hung on the wall, a slice of horizontal brought flat. When also making a flat surface stand up on its own, Reiter Raabe’s works both mimics and becomes a sculpture.

Jessica Warboys’ paintings are a result of the harnessing of the independent force of nature, in that they are made mainly by placing canvas in the sea. Direction, hands free, is never just one way, as the visual result and surrounding narrative dissolves a rhythm of autonomous and independent logic. The result, anything but pictorial or determined, manages to convey a sense of diffuse powerlessness. It is a matter of throwing yourself in, metaphorically, as the vison appears, against a sub plot of expectation about what a painting should actually do. A production of non-centralised, all-over activity; the movement of water, like that harnessed for electricity, brings about a mass of image shown roughly across a structure.

Her films follow a similar sense. Warboys’ brings image in and out of focus and associative relief using text, scratch, picture of place and, a broken, but directed, mixture of sharp and blunt, diffuse, and concentrated association and disassociation. The film makes an unusual sweep or swoop between the physical and representational, and back again. The relation between real time and moving image is fascinating. The water moves over the surface of the sea paintings, and the imagery in the moving image also seems to have a nature of its own. Warboys’ edits with precision, yet the logic of the beat and rationale of captured place, symbolic moment, associative significance allows a sweep of interference across the work. The implication is of an artist affected by, rather than affecting, the result. Such collaging is not new, of course, but the relation to time, the fact that there is no narrative, as such, creates a quickening in shift, from general to specific, totality to particularity, to extend territory and a sense of possibility. The fact the artist makes something last over time extends a form of conscious unconsciousness. 

Made in a sort of ‘hands free’ manner the somewhat belligerent iconographic paintings by Harminder Judge, are as much a matter of relief as paint. As with the work of Reiter Raabe and Warboys, with imagery, in Judge’s case a splattering, or mass, of pigment suspended within its own physical volume, a swarm of flies caught in aspic, in an apparently indirect manner. The subject and direction is petrified within a build-up of material and the work functions in a back to front manner, with the work reflecting gestural movement. The iconic, shift, rivulet of action, put in from behind or on top, arrives fixed and finite and front of stage, as it were, with hard surface, and diffuse action held still. The gesture is suspended, frozen in time, when turned from upside down and around to face us.  So, like the director of an opera, the artist achieves total revelation only after the curtain has lifted at the dress rehearsal. Made up of many gestures and moments, after copious process and care, the instant breath or cross section of reaction is revealed with colour making up an image delivered all at once. Works by Judge allude to the gesture of expressionism but also to a statement that comes, perhaps, from elsewhere. Loose powdery material leaves a trace, like a script or language of painterly ambition. Like Reiter Raabe, who paints from above, neither artist is in a position to stand back, as it were, and choose what they have made. With trust in the process, something has landed.

The action somehow in Tereza Červeňová’s photographs, is held still. They are about, or of, a decision to allow layers of actuality to be caught across the surface; a sort of dive into space brought up to flatness. So much is going on off the side, of course, elsewhere, and everywhere. Or perhaps nothing is happening anywhere, that can have visual, formal, even aesthetic significance till held, not so much still, but as an example of place, space, and insignificant continuity. While the artists in the show have a roundabout, back to front, approach to a subsequent result, Červeňová’s photographs arrive in differing size and scale as perhaps stripping observation, to be shared, understood and appreciated in part for the continuation of the Modernist dream about the observation of elements, cut out ,collaged into consciousness. The loveliness of the disturbed flat sheet, a wall, the reflection in a window; really anything that brings the smear, tear, crumple, layered levels of visual language together. Červeňová’s photographs take on a role that washes up and away an exact sense of direction and subject, in order to remain in the role they play. The photograph, in this case mimics the whoosh of the chemical that in real life washes across the surface of photographic paper, and so with production mimicking the subject, form and content meet in the middle to become not just a self-defining image but a page holder as it were, in the relationship between art and photograph.

Rising Skin from Rock and Chin
10 Jun - 30 Jul 2022
The Sunday Painter, London

A poem by Rosanna Puyol accompanies the exhibition, read here

Imbued with an indelible vibrancy and depth, Harminder Judge makes transportive sculptural works that simultaneously reference Indian neo-tantric painting, as well as the abstract expressionist and colourfield movements of the 20th century. His alchemical process involves layering pigments into pools of wet plaster followed by prolonged periods of excavation; sanding, polishing and oiling. Culminating in expansive modular panels, and ineffable shapes which seem to hover off the wall, colour, forms, and compositions are allowed to reveal themselves and intensify over time. 

This all results in a gleaming, vibrating surface where monolithic forms, seething horizons, and emanations of colour rise up from the solid granite-like depth beneath. The interplay between the granular and cosmic playout here and there is a real sense of a material phenomenon taking place, the remnants of which appear both crystallised and in a state of flux. The works as such exist in the present moment; Harminder has referred to them not as paintings but portals that offer us a wide plane to look through, allowing for broader contemplation to take place.

Over the last few years Harminder’s titles often serve as reference points to a pivotal and formative moment in his teenage years. Arriving in Amritsar, Punjab at the age of 15, Harminder made the journey to his family’s village in Attowal where he took part in the funeral rites of his Grandfather who had recently passed away. This involved intimate rituals such as undressing and washing the body, preparing the cremation pyre on the family sugarcane farm, tending the burning pyre throughout the night under a blanket of stars, and collecting his Grandfather’s ashes, bone fragments and jewellery in the hazy morning sun. This physical and spiritual transformation of body becoming ash, of material becoming immaterial, physical becoming metaphysical, are concepts that tacitly underpin his practice.

Rising Skin from Rock and Chin
10 Jun - 30 Jul 2022
The Sunday Painter, London

A poem by Rosanna Puyol accompanies the exhibition, read here

Imbued with an indelible vibrancy and depth, Harminder Judge makes transportive sculptural works that simultaneously reference Indian neo-tantric painting, as well as the abstract expressionist and colourfield movements of the 20th century. His alchemical process involves layering pigments into pools of wet plaster followed by prolonged periods of excavation; sanding, polishing and oiling. Culminating in expansive modular panels, and ineffable shapes which seem to hover off the wall, colour, forms, and compositions are allowed to reveal themselves and intensify over time. 

This all results in a gleaming, vibrating surface where monolithic forms, seething horizons, and emanations of colour rise up from the solid granite-like depth beneath. The interplay between the granular and cosmic playout here and there is a real sense of a material phenomenon taking place, the remnants of which appear both crystallised and in a state of flux. The works as such exist in the present moment; Harminder has referred to them not as paintings but portals that offer us a wide plane to look through, allowing for broader contemplation to take place.

Over the last few years Harminder’s titles often serve as reference points to a pivotal and formative moment in his teenage years. Arriving in Amritsar, Punjab at the age of 15, Harminder made the journey to his family’s village in Attowal where he took part in the funeral rites of his Grandfather who had recently passed away. This involved intimate rituals such as undressing and washing the body, preparing the cremation pyre on the family sugarcane farm, tending the burning pyre throughout the night under a blanket of stars, and collecting his Grandfather’s ashes, bone fragments and jewellery in the hazy morning sun. This physical and spiritual transformation of body becoming ash, of material becoming immaterial, physical becoming metaphysical, are concepts that tacitly underpin his practice.

Love Letter
13 Jan - 25 Feb 2023
Pace, New York
Co-curated by Loie Hollowell and Harminder Judge

Agnes Pelton, G.R. Santosh, Loie Hollowell, Harminder Judge

Download the press release here

This show will bring works by Hollowell and Judge in conversation with paintings by Agnes Pelton, a founding member of the Transcendental Painting Group in the United States, and Ghulam Rasool Santosh, a modernist Kashmiri painter and poet associated with the neo-tantra painting movement in India. Together, the 24 works in the exhibition—six by each of the four artists included—will conjure new connections between painting of the 20th century and the present day, foregrounding the experiential and transportive power of abstraction. Running concurrently with Hollowell’s first institutional solo show in the US at the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, Love Letter will be complemented by a dedicated booklet produced by Pace Publishing and available on-site at the gallery in spring 2023.

With Love Letter, Hollowell and Judge will present a personal and heartfelt ode to two painters who have deeply impacted their own practices. Rather than attempting to fill art historical gaps with this show, the artists aim to cultivate new dialogues across temporal and geographic boundaries. Coursing through the exhibition—which brings works by Hollowell, Judge, Pelton, and Santosh together for the first time—is an ineffable spirituality. These four artists are united in their efforts to represent the intangible through the phenomenological languages of color, shape, and light. Hollowell and Judge invite viewers to engage in meditative encounters with the paintings in Love Letter to uncover new formal and conceptual links among the artists’ distinctive interconnected practices.

Hollowell is known for her otherworldly paintings and drawings exploring bodily landscapes. Through a unique lexicon of geometric and organic forms that represent the human body, its capabilities, and its processes, the artist examines her relationship to her own embodied experiences with sex, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and motherhood. Using radiant color, space, light, volume and scale, gradients, and protruding sculptural elements, Hollowell draws viewers into her energetic compositions. In Love Letter, she will present six recent paintings that examine the relationships between the body, mind, and spirit. Among Hollowell’s contributions to the show are Split orbs in mauve, magenta, green, teal and yellow (2022) and Fully Dilated (2022), which exemplify her ability to convert physiological and psychological subject matter into ethereal abstractions.

Judge often refers to his sculptural abstractions as “portals,” and his work is heavily influenced by the history of neo- tantric painting in India—a 20th century movement for which Santosh was a leading voice—as well as abstract expressionist and color field painting from the same period. His alchemical process for creating these works involves layering pigments into pools of wet plaster, followed by prolonged periods of excavation, sanding, polishing and oiling. Through this technique, the artist produces expansive modular panels and smaller, often shaped works that seem to hover off the wall. Judge’s compositions intensify and fully reveal themselves over time, resulting in gleaming, vibrating surfaces in which monolithic forms, bodily abstractions, seething horizons, and bold colors arise from granite-like depths. Interplays between the granular and the cosmic are central to the material phenomena taking place in Judge’s works, which appear at once crystallized and in flux. Viewers are invited to look through, rather than at, the works he creates by way of this experimental fresco method. The alternate realms to which Judge’s works lead are open- ended, vast, and as unknowable as the cosmos. In Love Letter, he will show recent works that, situated in conversation with paintings by Hollowell, Pelton, and Santosh, speak to visual and spiritual expressions of the micro and macro, of interiority and exteriority.

Pelton is known for her radiant canvases depicting dreamscapes mined from the artist’s own psyche—in recent years, her paintings have garnered significant institutional attention in the US. Santosh’s paintings, rarely exhibited in North America, make use of bold color and symmetrical compositions to unearth a universal spirituality. Historic works by these two artists—who took up their painting practices to find deeper meaning in life—bring philosophical gravity to the fore of Love Letter.

Pelton’s paintings, which will figure in the upcoming group exhibition Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, are marked by rich color, organic and lyrical forms, and celestial plays of light through which the artist brought her innermost visions to life. Among the works by Pelton in Love Letter are Caves of the Mind (1929), featuring multicolored openings illuminated by a soft light; Rose & Palm (1931), which reflects the artist’s intense interest in symbolism; and The Chalice (1932), in which spindly, linear formations weave in and around a vessel. Pelton’s legacy can be most clearly traced in paintings by Hollowell, who has cited the artist as an enduring influence and inspiration.

Santosh’s symmetrical compositions, rendered in vivid, saturated colors, are concerned with enactments of harmony and balance. Like Pelton, Santosh aimed to give visual form to mystical and divine subjects, and his work often explores cosmic topographies in which self-contained geometric entities exist as part of a unified whole. The artist imbued his meticulously constructed tableaus with numerical and symbolic meaning, bringing historical devotional painting traditions and tantric iconographies from India into dialogue with elements of European Modernism, especially the visual language of Cubism. In his work, Santosh cultivated a new, spiritually resonant geometric formalism. Santosh began his painting practice later in life, and his canvases from the 1970s and 1980s will figure in Love Letter. Among these works is Untitled (1984), in which biomorphic and geometric shapes coalesce into an imagined landscape.