Judy Rifka

Judy Rifka (born 1945) is an American artiste active in the past the 1970s as a painter and video artist. She works heavily in New York City's Tribeca and Lower East Side and has joined with movements coming out of the Place in the 1970s and 1980s such as Colab and the East Village, Manhattan art scene.

Rifka took portion in the 1979 Public Arts International/Free Speech art performances, the 1980 Colab The Times Square Show, in two Whitney Museum Biennials (1975, 1983), in Documenta 7, participated in the 1981 Just Another Asshole project, and normal the lid of Art in America in 1984 for her series, Architecture. These works employed three-dimensional stretchers that she adopted in exhibitions dating to 1982. In a 1985 review in the New York Times, Vivien Raynor noted Rifka's shift to large paintings of the female nude, which as a consequence employed the three-dimensional stretchers.These works were exhibited at Brooke Alexander Gallery. In a 1985 episode of Miami Vice, Bianca Jagger played a feel attacked in tummy of Rifka's three-dimensional nude still-life, Bacchanaal, which was upon display at the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale.

Rene Ricard said of Rifka in his influential December 1987 Art Forum article about the iconic identity of artists from Van Gogh to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring,The Radiant Child, "We are that radiant child and have spent our lives defending that little baby, constructing an adult with insinuation to it to protect it from the unlisted signals of forces we have no govern over. We are that little baby, the radiant child, and our name, what we are to become, is uncovered us and we must become “Judy Rifka” or “Jean-Michel” the pretentiousness I became “Rene Ricard.” The untitled acrylic painting on plywood, in the increase of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the artist's use of plywood as a substrate for painting. Artist and writer Mark Bloch called her work "imaginative surfaces that support experimental laboratories for interferences in sensuous pigment." According to artiste and curator Greg de la Haba, Judy Rifka's peculiar polygons upon plywood "are in the midst of the most important paintings of the decade".

In 2013, Rifka's daily posts upon Facebook garnered a large social media audience for her imaginative "selfies," erudite kind comments, and widely attended solo and outfit exhibitions, both in Manhattan and as far-off as art6 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia and beyond.
Judy Rifka's pop figuration is noted for its agitated line and frenetic pace. Joseph Masheck described Rifka in his 1993 book, Modernities, saying that "Rifka’s wit, which luckily keeps going on with her anxious agitation, entails putting tall care into a ‘careless’ look. And in a world charged subsequently contending impersonal forces, this is with advertising in reverse, ‘pushing’ the individual consciousness in anything its brave fragility."

In the January 1998 concern of Art in America, Vincent Carducci echoed Masheck, “Rifka reworks the neo-classical and the pop, setting whatever sources in suggestion for today’s art-world cognoscenti.”
Rifka, along similar to artists later than David Wojnarowicz, helped to take Pop sensibility into a milieu that incorporated politics and tall art into Postmodernism; Robert Pincus-Witten acknowledged in his 1988 essay, Corinthian Crackerjacks & Passing Go that "Rifka’s commitment to process and discovery, doctrine behind Abstract Expressionist practice, is of paramount business though there is nothing dogmatic or pious nearly Rifka’s use of method. Playful promptness and delight in discovery is everywhere evident in her painting."

In 2016, a large retrospective of Rifka's art was shown at the Jean-Paul Najar Foundation in Dubai. In 2017, Gregory de la Haba presented a Rifka retrospective at the Amstel Gallery in The Yard, a section of Manhattan described as "a labyrinth of little cubicles, conference rooms and little office spaces that are rented out to youngster entrepreneurs, professionals and hipsters". In 2019 her video Bubble Dancers New Space Ritual was agreed for the International Istanbul Bienali.