Judith Simonian

Working across painting and collage, Judith Simonian’s practice explores the relationship between architecture, memory and perception through layered compositions shaped by montage and spatial disruption. Combining geometric structures with fluid, expressive mark-making, she constructs paintings in which perspective and scale remain deliberately unstable, allowing fragments of interior, landscape and urban space to collide and dissolve into one another. Translucent washes of colour are set against sharper linear forms and built-up surfaces, balancing abstraction with moments of illusionistic depth. Influenced by observation and the sensory experience of place, Simonian’s works evoke environments shaped as much by emotion as by physical reality. Her paintings unfold through unexpected juxtapositions and shifting spatial relationships, transforming built spaces into immersive psychological terrains. 

Simonian was born in Los Angeles, California in 1945. She studied art at California State University, earning a BA in 1967 and an MA in 1974. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including two National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship Grants (1987, 1990); Individual Support Grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation (2000, 2006); and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2014). She has undertaken residencies at Yaddo, New York; MacDowell, New Hampshire; the BAU Institute, Cassis; and the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes. Simonian has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, with major group exhibitions at the Seibu Museum, Tokyo; the New Museum, New York; MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Solo exhibitions include Plush, a 12-year survey at 1GAP, Grand Army Plaza Gallery, New York (2022–23). Her work is held in public and private collections including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, San Diego; the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa; and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford. Simonian currently lives and works in New York.