Lucy Fradkin, Family Tree opens to the public on Thursday, March 25th 6 -8 pm at the Nancy Margolis Gallery in the Chelsea Art District in Manhattan. The gallery is located at 523 West 25th Street. Ground Floor 212 242.3013. Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 6pm The exhibition runs through May 1st.

Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, 2009

Lucy Fradkin's paper-doll-like portraits at Clark Gallery appear simple, but they're packed with personality. Her images of black people -- her Jamaican husband Arthur Simms, or her Brooklyn neighbors in the brilliant "He Was a Plumber, an Electrician, a Carpenter, a Cabinetmaker, a Tiler, a Blacksmith and a Mechanic," featuring a family posing against a red backdrop -- pop off the wall.

It has to do with skin tone and color contrasts; in these works, the darker skin plays joyfully off bright backgrounds. Then Fradkin adds in wild patterns--in "He Was a Plumber...," we see a green summer dress and intricately patterned necklace, a pink dress with white polka dots, a wood-tiled floor. The work becomes almost musical, with filigrees and whispers and hot tones swirling around the straight-backed figures.
-Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe, November 26, 2008

The engaging, full-length portraits created by Lucy Fradkin immediately attract and entice with their rich, deep, luscious palette and intricate, graphic decorative patterns that derive from textiles, rugs, and wallpaper. Her portrait compositions rarely deviate, as she presents friends, acquaintances, and diverse peoples that she meets in a somewhat relaxed, but acutely aware formal frontal format. The figures in her compositions are utterly alert to the presence of a viewer on the other end. They gaze directly out at us and pose somewhat self-consciously in ways that are subconsciously oriented towards specific gender presentations of the self to the outside world. The environment in which Fradkin paints her subjects contains both realistic elements such as intricate wallpaper designs, pictures on a wall and furniture, but it is part fantasy as well. Fradkin chooses not to detract from her subjects by situating them in a realistic space, but removes all but the most necessary of objects and items to delineate the sparest of interior domestic environments or the outdoors. The artist plays with the different spatial elements within the composition, tilting the planes of tables up so we see their surfaces, while flattening out the depth, so that there is no recognizable sense of space or receding background. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque ushered in this innovative way of looking at space with their Cubist compositions in the early twentieth century. In Fradkin’s portraits, color is also heightened to a theatrical blood red or sometimes acidic, candy green. With another artist, these reductive, eye-popping elements might tilt the portraits towards the cartoon, but Fradkin’s delicate technique, compassion for her subjects, and unerring compositional eye renders her portraits even that much more human and vulnerable. Her deft use of color adds an emotional content to her portraits as it doubles as both a background and as an indicator of mood and possibly culture and ethnicity. Fradkin’s work is utterly contemporary with its stripped down, minimal, highly detailed qualities but it is also firmly rooted in many folk and art historical sources from the ancient to the modern.
One of the most striking aspects about Lucy Fradkin’s portraits is her use of color and decoration in every composition and how these two forces play against her deft utilization of empty, flat space.
-Lisa Hatchadoorian, Curator, Nicolaysen Art Museum, 2008