Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Although Judy Pfaff gained notoriety for her elaborate installations, she is also well regarded as an innovative printmaker. Known for lush, complex prints, she often uses multiple printing techniques and hand-applied additions. In this work, she prints the image on two separate pieces of paper and then cuts small holes into the top sheet to reveal peeks of the orange layer underneath (just as she’d earlier poked “keyholes” into gallery walls to show bits of the next room). Pfaff depicts nature not as a static object, but as a psychological and spiritual extension of ourselves—“a human metaphor”—with the veins of a leaf/branches of a tree in this people-sized print like a circulatory system.