Still Life with Olives and Orange Slices (Primary Title)
Judy Rifka, American, born 1945 (Artist)
Fifty Works for Fifty States: In 2008, in a unique partnership with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Vogels distributed twenty-five hundred works across the country, giving fifty works to one art museum in each of the fifty states. This exhibition, The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, showcases the fifty works VMFA received as part of that initiative, which bears the same title. As a diverse and rich body of work, the Vogels' generous giftattests to their passion and commitment to sharing contemporary art with the public.
Judy Rifka The Vogels met Rifka in the mid-1970s when, inspired by Russian Constructivist works, she was painting irregular geometric shapes on bare cardboard.As her subjects varied over the years, she maintained a keen awareness of previous art historical styles, often appropriating them with her own comical and sometimes-political interpretations. For instance, in the 1980s she confronted the genre of the female nude, painting overly buxom women in a cartoonlike style by outlining their curves with thick black lines and shaping the edge of the canvas to the contours of their bodies. Here the quieter sketches of fruits and vegetables explore anotherclassic art historical genre, the still life. She employs her characteristic black outlines, managing to make pimento stuffed olives slightly humorous in their awkwardness.
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