Judith Godwin: Style and Grace examines the stylistic evolution of one of this country's most gifted abstract painters. Godwin's move from Virginia to New York in the early 1950s coincided with the emergence of the New York School spearheaded by Willem DeKooning and the influential teacher Hans Hofmann, with whom Godwin studied. Ann Gibson explores Godwin's struggle to break away from the dominant "masculine" and existential values of the painters of the time toward an embrace of rich and complex color relationships, surface embellishment, and gracefully-curving forms. She also describes the influence of Zen philosophy, nature, and architectural design on Godwin's vibrantly hued, spatially open compositions of the 1980s and 1990s.
