“You don’t look at them, you look through them to think about ideas that are bigger than you.”
—Harminder JudgeUntitled (soil cursed and lit burst), executed in 2022, is a mercurial, seething example of Harminder Judge’s complex and multifaceted artistic practice. Fiery, wispy red-orange tones emanate from and through dark brown-black forms, resulting in an expansive and engaging composition of imposing scale. It is imbued with latent depth and intensity, a product of the artist’s practice of repeatedly layering pools of pigment in wet plaster before slowly, deliberately excavating and (re-)forming shape and colour. This is a technique that bears resemblance to fresco and Renaissance egg tempera painting yet also gives three-dimensional form to the passing of time and the repetitive, ritualistic acts of devotion. The edges of the work resemble an almost geological stratification of pigment and plaster, revealing the artist’s process. As with many of his recent works, Untitled (soil cursed and lit burst) refers obliquely to a formative point in Judge’s teenage years. Aged 15, he travelled to Amritsar, in the Majha region of Punjab, to participate in the funeral rites for his grand-uncle. These centred on the ritualistic preparation of the body for cremation on the family sugarcane farm, the supervision of the pyre overnight and the subsequent collection of his grandfather’s ashes, bone fragments and jewellery in the morning. The multiple processes of transformation involving and witnessed by the artist, whether physical, metaphysical, natural or spiritual, have generated a key conceptual underpinning for Judge’s practice on both compositional and formal levels. Peaceful and mediative, his work “asks us to embrace the depths of death, the moment we move between the physical and intangible, and to revel in the power of greeting it with eyes open”.i
This can be most clearly seen in the artist’s manipulation and handling of media and materials in Untitled (soil cursed and lit burst). By building up and then breaking down layers of pigment, plaster and polymer to construct the composition, there is an interplay between colour and shape that remains deliberate. In many ways, the present work is highly reminiscent of the physicality and materiality of Frank Bowling’s Poured Paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as their experimental approach to abstraction and process. However, the present work eschews formalist and mechanical underpinnings, with Judge instead prioritising a slippage between natural and abstract visual forms which is mirrored by his alchemical treatment and precise control of materials. In particular, by using layered sheets of hessian scrim, a coarse, woven material that forms a support for the plaster and pigment, he allows for an interplay between transparency and opacity which is perfectly apposite to the dual concepts of transformation and perception. Hung on the wall, the work is neither painting nor sculpture but rather a product of the flow between states of matter. Its surface polished and oiled, the composition oscillates between smooth and rough, foreground and background, finally operating as a liminal portal through, rather than from, which the viewer might discern meaning.
“I just saw everything as being connected and being one thing, in the same way that quantum physicists would see life as carbon—as out of the heart of a dying star. In that moment, I just saw it.”
—Harminder JudgeHarminder Judge works across a variety of media with his practice spanning painting, sculpture, performance and installation. Referencing and drawing on the colour field abstract expressionism of artists such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler in his painterly practice, his sculptural works reference Indian neo-tantric art. At the core of his oeuvre, however, lies a non-monolithic approach to form, colour and composition that remains informed by both natural phenomena and spiritual, cosmic elements. The present work perfectly encapsulates this constellation of meanings, implications and influences. In the artist’s understanding, ‘That’s what abstraction is so good at, it can transport you to the realm of the ineffable in a way that’s difficult in figuration or performance’.ii His practice, however, is non-hierarchical: Judge injects his more recent abstract works with a visceral aesthetic of physical sensation and memory borne out of earlier performance pieces. Most notable of these is Live Sermon (2007), a performance at the Tate Modern, London, in which he placed a modified speaker in his mouth. This played a recording of a holy man’s song while the artist himself stood in a pool of milk with his shoulders, neck and face painted blue. Judge has reflected on his works produced before 2011 as belonging to a period of ‘composting’ for his current practice, allowing him to explore meaning and consciousness to a greater degree of complexity.
Untitled (soil cursed and lit burst) embodies the lyrically powerful practice of an artist who is pushing the boundaries of contemporary artmaking. Testament to this, Judge’s works have recently been included in solo and group shows at galleries in London, Los Angeles, New York and Mumbai, amongst others. In 2023, he co-curated Love Letter with Loie Hollowell, a group show at Pace Gallery, New York, which brought works by the artists into conversation with paintings by Transcendental artist Agnes Pelton and Ghulam Rasool Santosh, a modernist Kashmiri painter. Through an idiosyncratic use of materials and engagement with multiple influences, Harminder Judge has quickly established himself as one of the most exciting artists working today.
