Huxley-Parlour gallery are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of works by Judy Dolnick (b. 1934, Chicago) in the United Kingdom. The exhibition surveys five decades of Dolnick’s career, featuring thirteen paintings and works on paper that underscore her significant contributions to the language of abstraction.

Dolnick’s practice is defined by an enduring commitment to colour as both subject and structure. Through alternating passages of dense form and colour with delicate brushstrokes upon open ground, Dolnick’s gestural mark making introduces rhythms and shapes that suggest natural forms. Across her canvases, intuitive chromatic relationships and expressive brushwork produce compositions that are rigorous and dynamic, dissolving visual hierarchies and expanding the possibilities of painterly space.

Emerging at the vanguard of Chicago’s art scene in the late 1950s, Dolnick co-founded the Wells Street Gallery with her husband Robert Natkin and fellow artists Gerald van de Wiele and Ann Mattingly. The gallery became a crucible for experimentation that brought together artists including Aaron Siskind and John Chamberlain. In 1959 she relocated to New York, exhibiting at the Poindexter Gallery alongside Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, and Franz Kline, situating her at the centre of Postwar Abstraction’s evolving discourses. She subsequently moved to Connecticut, where, pursuing her practice with creative independence, she developed a distinct visual language that would define her work for the next fifty years.

Rooted in the Modernist tradition and yet untethered from its strictures, Dolnick’s work demonstrates a distinctive visual language that resists categorisation. With works ranging from 1968 to 2020, the exhibition bears testament to her enduring innovation and ongoing experimentation, and consolidates her position as an important figure in American abstraction.