Judith Bernstein: Anger and Angst

February 2, 2025

Installation view, Judith Bernstein: Public Fears, 2025. Photo courtesy Kasmin Gallery.

For nearly sixty years, Judith Bernstein has been an artist who keeps score. Whether we are talking about bombs or catcalls, Bernstein responds viscerally, letting out the anger and angst about current events shared by many. Public Fears, her latest exhibition at Kasmin Gallery, responds to our present moment, when abusers have been elevated to leaders and public outcry seems almost impossible.

Public Fears is a massive undertaking, a museum-worthy survey of the artist’s work from 1966 to the present. Hung salon-style, the installation of mostly large-scale paintings and works on paper is calculated to visually assault and surprise viewers, even those familiar with her endlessly inventive and provocative output. Death Heads, the artist’s most recent series, takes up an entire wall and brings together her many themes and ideas. Scanning this wall filled with paintings of wailing faces, it is clear that Bernstein relishes creating a response to the frightening times we live in. The artist, now eighty-two, created 200 Death Heads in the past year, many large-scale (up to 80 by 90 inches). The compositions combine scream references, from Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting to the popular mask from the 1996 blockbuster movie. Josef Albers and his color theory are also in evidence with each work, testing the limits of color combinations. Without text and sound, these paintings leave us confronting our own terror of repression and death.

Judith Bernstein. Death Heads/ Hollow Head (on Blue), 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 79 in. (208.3 x 200.7 cm).
Photo courtesy Kasmin Gallery.

Of course, any of the faces in Death Heads, with their extended jawbone and two big eye sockets, could also be viewed as a penis and pair of balls, a pervasive motif in Bernstein’s work. Even as early as 1967, while still an MFA student at Yale, she created anti-war drawings such as Union Jack-Off Flag (1967), hung high on the wall here, in which a penis is paired with red, white, and blue rectangles. One can only imagine what her male classmates must have thought: Bernstein’s inspiration was not the history of abstraction but the graffiti in the men’s bathrooms. The scatological humor of graffiti—mostly jokes based on the male gaze—is turned on its head by this artist, a prescient move taken years before the appropriation of pornography by feminist artists of the 1980s and 1990s. 

Judith Bernstein. Three Panel Vertical, 1977. Charcoal on paper.
Photo courtesy Kasmin Gallery.

Likewise, another blast-from-the-past in the show is Three Panel Vertical (1977), a triptych of vertical drawings of phallic screws that appear to energetically drill downwards with violent slashes of charcoal. Sexually charged works like this kept Bernstein out of galleries for decades. She had the last laugh, however, when Horizontal (1973), another charcoal drawing of similar content, was acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023. 

Installation view, Judith Bernstein: Public Fears, 2025.
Photo courtesy Kasmin Gallery.

Almost a decade ago, Bernstein observed how the moneyed and privileged were ascending to power on the coattails of then-candidate Trump. She abruptly switched her colors to a neon palette and blacklight to convey alarm and the visceral sense of an impending emergency. In Money Shot-Yellow (2016), the Capitol building is filled to the brim with penises and hairy balls, spilling their sperm onto a screaming vagina dentata labeled “Trump.” There are symbols and swastikas alongside text and clashing colors that add a gut-wrenching layer of tones not easily erased or forgotten.

Bernstein’s finger remains firmly on the pulse of ideas and events of the twenty-first century; her sense of outrage has only grown over the years, never waning despite art world fashion or global politics. It is most refreshing to stand among this group of paintings, a welcome antidote to the daily headlines. 


Judith Bernstein: Public Fears at Kasmin Gallery, New York from January 6 to February 20, 2025.


Barbara Pollack is an art critic and curator based in New York City who has written about Chinese contemporary art since the late 1990s.  Her most recent book on the subject is Brand New Art from China: A Generation on the Rise (Bloomsbury, 2018) and in 2022, she curated Mirror Image: A Change in Chinese Identity at the Asia Society Museum in New York City.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *