Judith Bernstein: Public Fears

On January 6, 2025, Kasmin will open Judith Bernstein’s (b. 1942) third solo exhibition at the gallery, Public Fears. Taking over the flagship 509 West 27th Street gallery, the exhibition will survey nearly 60 years of work—from 1966 to the present—underscoring the enduring urgency of Bernstein’s trailblazing artistry. Including new paintings, works on paper, and a restaging of her iconic Signature Piece (1986), this will be Bernstein’s first New York solo exhibition since the acquisition of her major charcoal screw drawing Horizontal (1973) by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023. The exhibition anticipates the artist’s major museum retrospective at Kunsthaus Zurich in 2026.

Bernstein’s most recent painting series, Death Heads, adopts an inward-looking gaze and offers an introspective meditation on the sublimity of death. Distinguished from her earlier, more outwardly polemical works, these iconographic heads appear at once transfixed in awe and in a state of active alarm, reflecting the tension fundamental to the poetic dyad of life and death. The paintings draw on the same gestural movements of Bernstein’s earlier screws and their use of serial repetition, yet they employ less tongue-in-cheek double entendre and more art historical and cultural nods to the past—from Edvard Munch to M17 gas masks. As much as these paintings reflect a climate of ubiquitous violence and uncertainty, they are, at their core, diaristic expressions of an artist confronting her own impermanence.

A focal point of the exhibition will be a groundbreaking set of three charcoal screws, Three Panel Vertical (1977). Each panel is rendered in an explosively gestural manner that reignites the momentous energy it inspired nearly 50 years ago. Conflating war and sexual aggression, Bernstein began her series of large-scale phallic screws as the Vietnam War waged on, and these “masterpieces of feminist protest,” as described by Ken Johnson for The New York Times, have since become one of her most recognizable motifs. As Three Panel Vertical attests, Bernstein’s dedication to her charcoal screws never wavered after a Philadelphia museum refused to exhibit a related work in 1974 despite protest from Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Louise Bourgeois and many other prominent artists, curators, and critics. The once-censored Horizontal (1973) was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023.

A selection of works on paper spanning from Bernstein’s days at Yale in the 1960s to recent years will be featured, surveying celebrated series including the antiwar Fuck Vietnam (1966-67) and Union Jack-Off Flags (1967). Realized in protest of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, these works express Bernstein’s political dissent in the form of flags and jingoist imagery, riffing off of the crude and unfiltered humor of graffiti she observed in the men’s restrooms at Yale, during a time when the university only admitted male undergraduates. The grouping also includes a number of works from Bernstein’s Dick in a Head series (2010-2015). Sharing the fury and fervor of Fuck Vietnam while foreshadowing the ghostly faces of Death Heads, these works are emblematic of Bernstein’s life-long art practice of mining the subconscious. Nearby, Bernstein’s Word Drawings (1989-2009) burst with the same energy in their resolute exaggerations of the artist’s handwriting. The series, which debuted to the public at The Drawing Center in 2017, depict nonsequitous single words or phrases that become richly imbued with associative meaning when divorced from context.

Entering the gallery, a restaging of the artist’s iconic Signature Piece (1986) commandeers the facade of floor-to-ceiling windows—a steadfast declaration of Bernstein’s artistic presence by way of appropriating the male artistic ego. Nearby, the prophetic painting Money Shot - Yellow (2016) finds renewed fervor in the wake of another historic presidential election. It depicts the US Capitol in an incendiary appraisal of Donald Trump’s first administration, as if to foretell the insurrection by his supporters on January 6, 2020. 

Judith Bernstein: Public Fears creates a spectacle that transforms the current atmosphere of aggression and turns it into a weapon of critique. The exhibition serves as a testament to the raw resilience and unapologetic drive of an artist who has overcome censorship. In her words: “for me provocation is agitation and unveiling of serious issues with a sledgehammer. Memorable visual impact is my main priority… I confront issues head-on.”

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