Artwork Description
Judy Chicago – Flashback, version 2
Dimensions: 26.38 x 32.57″ framed / 20 x 26″ paper
Year: 1965
Medium: serigraph on paper
Edition: 36/40
Judy Chicago’s “Flashback, version 2” is from Early/Minimal (1965-1973). 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. Art historian Jenni Sorkin wrote of this work: “While Judy Chicago is best known as a pioneering feminist artist, the first decade of her artistic production is among the most complex, interesting…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….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”.