From the Archive: Artforum (Summer 1987)
Judith Dolnick
Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Gallery
by Ronnie Cohen
Originally Published on ArtForum (Summber 1987)
Working with an organic vocabulary of colorful forms that she sends spinning across her canvases, Judith Dolnick reveals herself to be an action painter in the deepest sense of this term. The vision she offers is thoroughly in tune with the dynamism that is paramount in nature and that has been significant in so much 20th-century art. The paintings impress as paeans to this dynamic force by virtue of the tremendously evocative force they carry within themselves. That force is produced by the interactions among the highly integrated structures in her compositions, which, far from appearing planned or calculated, seem—much to Dolnick’s credit—to have an aura of freedom and abandonment about them. It is released not in a single explosive spurt but in gentle waves that build to a crest of excitement, as the eye travels across the surface of each composition.