Judy Chicago

Judy Chicago’s early career is blossoming anew as the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative spurs encore presentations of the artist’s pre–Dinner Party production. Recent highlights in LA have included butterfly-shaped pyrotechnics displays (at Pomona College and Nye+Brown) and a glowing environment of gaseous dry ice (at Art Los Angeles Contemporary). A current eye-opening selection at Nye+Brown of Chicago’s early gallery work reveals sublimated impulses from a time when she was attempting to reconcile her feminist interests with a largely unreceptive male-dominated culture. Playing to the predominant macho Finish Fetish style by studying with boat-builders and auto-body workers, she rendered a corpus of timely Minimalist forms especially evocative in their emotive optic and chromatic indeterminacy.

In the thirty-seven genre-bending works on view, Chicago merges opposites, such as masculine and feminine, systematic and intuitive, hard and soft, reflective and transparent, into slick surface-structures. Her sculptural serial “Domes,” 1968, in which triangular arrangements of three polished metal or opalescent acrylic hemispheres rest on mirrored or acrylic Parsons tables, feel like architectural designs for a lusciously sensate utopia. Complementary series of “Dome Drawings,” 1968–69, which are color wheel studies in Prismacolor pencil, and the closely related “Donut Drawings” (rings instead of discs), 1968, further radiate a rigorous rainbowlike inclusivity. The most substantial individual works, the immense wall-mounted acrylic panels like Morning Fan, 1971, temper hard-edge grid compositions with radial symmetry and squares of gradient pastel hues.

Chronologically bookended by works with overt “central core” imagery, Chicago’s term for vaginal iconography, the exhibition encourages us to read her Minimalist curves and lines not just for perceptual effect but also as mild anatomical abstractions—a suggestion reinforced by titles like Flesh Gardens and Click Cunts. Specifically, Bigamy Hood and Birth Hood, two stunning, boldly graphic lacquered Corvair car hoods Chicago designed in 1965 but cocooned until 2011, reveal an explicit pre-Minimalist sexuality that proved too radical for postwar LA. Meanwhile, a 1973 canvas, Through the Flower 2, depicting a horizon within a petal-ringed orifice, invites not a new journey but a continuation of the one already initiated—however subtly—here.