Judy Rifka

The exhibition NYC | MUC | BER : Destination Murnau at PULPO GALLERY stages a confluence of artistic practices that oscillate between the material and the conceptual, the personal and the collective. It is an exhibition about dialogues-between cities, disciplines, and forms-and how these exchanges resonate within a shared space. Murnau, with its layered cultural and natural histories, becomes the grounding point for this interplay of ideas and aesthetics.

Judy Rifka was born in New York City in 1945. Was a student and lifelong friend of artist Ron Gorchov, ex-wife of painter David Reed, and was an integral part of the 70’s and 80’s downtown scene of New York City. A restless spirit with a Postmodernist, punk-like soul, Rifka set forth as an artist during the heyday of the Age of Aquarius, the hippie generation in the midst of Vietnam and political chaos. Her pro-action mindset in such an environment allowed Rifka to explore love and art simultaneously, whether traveling around Europe with 60’s sensation Donovan, the Scotish singer/songwriter of “Mellow Yellow” or living on a Navajo Reservation in New Mexico to better understand space in a vast area, Judy Rifka was passionately and assuredly building on her Constructivist mindset for the paintings that would eventually put her on the map in the mid 1970’s: her Single Shapes on plywood.

Beautiful blonde waves, a gracile nude female figure and a mythical scallop shell - In the mid 1480s, the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli changed the art world with his tempera masterpiece The Birth of Venus. His Italian Renaissance artwork set new standards for fine art and inspired artists all over the world in the centuries that followed.



Almost 540 years later, in (Re)Birth of Venus - Renaissance Painting 2.0 some of todays most talked about contemporary artists take a deeper look at Botticelli's masterpiece and reinterpret the mythical moment of the goddess’ arrival on land after her birth. As part of a Renaissance revival in this day and age, painting, sculpture, craftmanship and street art merge together in this show.



Featuring 12 international contemporary artists: Jake Wood-Evans, Goin, Gao Hang, Paa Joe, Guillermo Lorca, Madsaki, Joseph Meloy, Amadeo Morelos, Ricardo Passaporte, Judy Rifka, Mircea Suciu and Sophie Vallance.

It was June 7, 2020 when it hit the Pulpo Gallery inbox: Newsletter Signup Confirmation of Brett De Palma We were flabbergasted. Could this possibly be the Brett De Palma...

Portraits: 1962 - 2017 examines the use of portraits in art across different mediums such as photography, oil paintings and drawings.

The journey takes us from Europe to Asia and from Africa to North America. We revisit Marilyn Monroe's famous "The Last Sitting", watch Georg Baselitz remix his provocative work "Big Night, explore Jean-Michel Basquiat's use of materials such as found wood or his early adoption of xerox photocopy and are mesmerized by Alex Katz's big scale portrait "Martha" or Jiro Takamatsu's Shadow (No. 1430).