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Häusler Contemporary München is proud to present "Thinking of You", an all-over installation comprising a wall painting and new paintings on canvas by Judy Ledgerwood (b. 1959, lives and works in Chicago).

Since the beginning of her career in the 1980s Ledgerwood has been exploring light, colour and space in monumental paintings on canvas and wall paintings. Her vividly coloured compositions combine the formal vocabulary of concrete abstraction with influences from pop culture traditionally associated with women such as fashion or textile design. By expanding the boundaries of concrete abstraction to include the subversive aspect of sensuality, she has furthermore developed a new and unique aspect in painting.

Ledgerwood's paintings have been included in numerous international exhibitions, among others at the Museum of Contemporary Art and The Renaissance Society in Chicago, and can be found in a number of important collections, among which the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Her work was introduced to Germany and Switzerland by Häusler Contemporary in 2005, respectively 2008. In 2009 Hatje Cantz published the first monograph on Ledgerwood; edited by Christa and Wolfgang Häusler, it is the first extensive survey of the artist's work since the late 1980s.

At the beginning of her career, Ledgerwood gained recognition for her abstract compositions in "feminine" pastel colours, which were reminiscent of landscape painting - a self-conscious challenge of the classical tradition of gestual abstraction. Since the 1990s she has been reducing her painterly vocabulary to basic geometrical forms such as circles and squares, which she assembles into vibrantly sensual compositions of intense colourfulness. In these works, she deliberately includes decorative ornaments commonly used in textile arts and crafts in order to question the meanings commonly associated with colours and forms.

"Thinking of You" at Häusler Contemporary München is Ledgerwood's first all-over installation in Europe. On the backdrop of a specifically conceived wall painting that spreads through the gallery space, the artist has arranged a series of new paintings with variations of the same motif, an overpass in the shape of a flower in bright and powerful colours. Her composition "Honeypot", for instance, uses precious shimmering gold pigments in conjunction with deep ultramarine blue and bright magenta, while in "Mid-Summer's Day", radiant shades of orange and magenta condense to create the tangible impression of shimmering heat evoked by the title of the work.

Upon closer observation, her works radiate a fascinating impression: by setting glossy colours against matt shades, Ledgerwood effectively underlines the materiality of colour which, depending on the light, allows for a wide range of visual experiences. The painter's brush strokes remain visible, and seemingly inadvertent flaws such as paint drips refer to the manual process of painting. Through subtle overlays of various forms, Ledgerwood furthermore suggest a spatial structure in the image plane.

"The live quality of that viewing experience and its fragility is something that I really work at. It's one oft the ways that I determine if the paintings are successful; it they look good in really different types of light."*

The interaction of light and colour instils Ledgerwood's paintings with a vibrant sensuality that radiates into the environing space. The artist thus creates a both exciting and irritating dialogue between surface, space and time.

* The artist in an interview with Susanne Ghez for The Renaissance Society, 27 May 2009. Quoted in Christa und Wolfgang Häusler (eds.), Judy Ledgerwood, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009, p. 113.