Biography

I love the great art of the past and present. Painting has always been a most significant part of my life.
I want my work to have an unabashed sensual beauty as well as a rigorous plastic order.
I hope my work conveys a MAGIC—that which makes art alive—beyond its immediate attractiveness.
— Judith Dolnick

Art ’65: Lesser Known and Unknown Painters,
American Express Pavilion, New York World’s Fair

Judy Dolnick (b. 1934) has been working and exhibiting her lush abstract paintings since the late 1950s where, upon her return to Chicago with her art degree from Stanford, she, alongside artists Robert Natkin, Gerald van de Wiele, and Ann Mattingly opened the Wells Street Gallery, as a reaction to the lack of opportunities for emerging artists to exhibit the expressionistic paintings they were making at the time. With the struggling folk singer Odetta rehearsing upstairs, Dolnick and her crew created what critic Max Kozloff called "an avant-garde exhibition place filled with the most advanced abstractions in town.” The Wells Street Gallery is credited for giving many of the group, including the sculptor John Chamberlain, their first solo exhibition.

Dolnick moved to New York City in 1959 and began exhibiting alongside such seminal abstract artists as Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Franz Kline at the prestigious Poindexter Gallery. In the 1980s, she was represented by Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery. Critic Michael Brenson in The New York Times called her work the answer to “Matisse, Kandinsky and Dufy.”

Dolnick is most influenced by expressionism, and her works pay homage to Van Gogh (with whom she shares a birthday), Gauguin, and Redon. Except for the slight pull of nostalgia, Dolnick's nonfigurative paintings are without a hint of gravity. Her seemingly endless expression of color is spontaneous and intuitive. In a mode of receptive reverie, Dolnick offers a surreal world dense with bucolic, ambiguous and semi-familiar shapes that suggest landscapes through scattered pulses of paint. Rhythm and gesture play a critical role in the process of Dolnick's work, a process she has continued to develop despite of her absence from the New York art world. This selection of paintings are like bright daydream fantasies.

There clearly are developments of Dolnick’s more recent work and nobody could now speak of it as ‘feminine’ […] It is as though at some point Dolnick decided to pull her images apart from each other in order to investigate their meaning in isolation. …[now] She has begun to bring them closer together, so that there is a stronger relationship between image and ground. There are subtle movements also, at first undetectable, but eventually the viewer becomes concious of hidden pendulums, oscillations along circular or elliptical paths. There is something exceedingly strange…in Dolnick’s work that I find captivating.

– Lawrence Campbell, Art in America, February 1988

Judith Dolnick graduated from Stanford University and studied art in Chicago. Solo exhibitions include Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn (2015); Klonaridies Gallery, Toronto (1986, 1989); Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer, New York (1983, 1987); Hoshour Gallery, Albuquerque (1979); Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY (1976); Well Street Gallery, Chicago, IL (1957, 1958, 1959). Recent group exhibitions include “Judith Dolnick, Hermine Ford, Libby Hartle, Joan Witek,” Salon Zürcher, New York (2018); “Side by Side: Robert Natkin and Judith Dolnick,” Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack (2016); “Arshile Gorky and a selection of contemporary drawings,” Outlet Fine Art, Brooklyn (2014); “To be a Lady: forty-five women in the arts,” 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York (2012); “The Wells Street Gallery Revisited,” Lesley Helley Workspace, New York (2012). Dolnick’s work can be found in the permanent collections of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, The Mint Museum of Art, Mint, Charlotte, The Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State University, and The Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, among others.