Judy Glantzman is a seminal figure of New York’s East Village art scene, whose emotionally raw and visually layered paintings have evolved over four decades while retaining their deeply personal, confrontational edge. Her work blends figuration and abstraction in a restless, searching process—portraits and bodies often emerge from frenetic mark-making, layered gestures, and a dialogue between image and erasure.

Drawing on personal history, political trauma, and mythic storytelling, Glantzman’s paintings and works on paper act as psychological excavations. Faces multiply, fracture, and dissolve, revealing the instability of identity and the endurance of memory. Themes of war, grief, ancestry, and the inner life recur across her oeuvre, yet always with a spirit of reinvention and painterly urgency. Decades-old paintings have been revisited, manifesting a debate between herself as an artist of today and her younger self, allowing her to see both the aesthetic shifts as well as the profound dedication to her way of making. Her totemic female power figures may or may not be seen as self portraits but they share space in her work with women from. Art history like Rembrandt’s Bathsheba with classic television detective Joe Columbo.

Now based in the Hudson Valley, Glantzman continues to paint with the same immediacy and intensity that marked her rise in the East Village during the 1980s. Her studio practice remains uncompromising—intimate, fearless, and driven by a belief in painting as a way of thinking.