Judith Simonian

[9][10] Artcritical's Deborah Garwood describes Simonian’s paintings as intuitive works which "knit luscious pictorial fields that tease cognition and the senses" and suggest the mind's "contradictory resilience and fallibility" in grasping contemporary existence.

[13] Soon after graduating, she was invited to join Grandview Galleries, which became the early feminist art collective Double X; based in the Woman's Building in downtown Los Angeles, its members included Nancy Buchanan, Judy Chicago, Merion Estes, Barbara Smith and Faith Wilding.

[2][25][3][4] Both bodies are rooted in assemblage strategies and an intuitive working process that begins with recognizable elements, which she alters through addition, effacement or abstraction; they juxtapose disparate contexts to create formal and cognitive tension and enigmatic, almost archaeological narratives.

[30][31][32] Her installation for Creative Time's "Art on The Beach" program, Villa San Itta (1988), featured a cast concrete Palladian façade suggesting an architectural ruin that surprised visitors by disguising and giving entry to portable toilets attached at the backside.

[36][6][37][39] They maintain Simonian's mixed-media approach, often using mosaic tiles to further dualities between interior and exterior (e.g., El Capitan), decorative and pictorial, and abstract and illusionistic; critics compare the effect to Mondrian’s transformation of natural imagery into patterns of squares and Bonnard's collapse of indoor and outdoor.

[2][10] Critics note this work for its mix of incongruous subjects and disparate styles, sense of light and space, and palpable atmosphere, captured efficiently in loose, shorthand-like brushwork, saturated watercolor washes and built up surfaces.

[2][10][43] Reviewing Simonian's suite of watercolor collages, "Chronic Civilization" (Janet Kurnatowski, 2006), Shane McAdams highlighted Red Coliseum for its foregrounded, gauzy paper strips opening like windows into vague space and its vertical swaths of wet scarlet and lavender, which he compared to Morris Louis "Veil" paintings.

[44][26][45] For example, Mountain with Flags (2012), Ski Lift (2013) and Ferry Boat (2018) feature curtains of color slathered over idyllic landscapes punctured by breaks, holes, ruptures or collaged shards; Huffington Post suggests that the disjunctures of natural and man-made, sublime and banal invite uneasy thoughts about hubris and romantic idealism, spiritual tourism and ecological degradation.

[1] The larger Snow Cone (2014) blends coherent space and spatial disruption, juxtaposing a central frosted cake wedge, a bright, rough-textured yellow background casting an optical-illusion shadow, and punning allusions to collage strategies ("slice," "layers").

[1][46] Critics compare the contrasts of context and content of these image shards and pictures-within-a-picture to jump-cuts in film or dream imagery; Larry List writes that Simonian's "tough compositional and color decisions result in works with a rugged, feral beauty [that] escape the trap of any sort of conventional resolution.