Press

THE CURATORS AND CRITICS SAY………

….Her ability to organize, disorganize and reorganize space is animated by the emotional intensity injected into each form. Her working methods mix the deeply serious with the absurd - a strategy that makes her work approachable, inviting, distinctive and memorable.”
Kay Whitney, Evolvers and Wildtypes; Sculpture Space catalogue essay; 2024 LINK

….Like spores migrating by chance of wind or animal digestion, Hoffman reconfigured fragments from around her studio, creating what resembles environments or biochemical processes. Anita Trombetta, Curator; Invernal Spore, Field of Play Gallery 2025;
Invernal Spore

....Hoffman balance(s) intent with the uncontrolled, carefully guiding chance to craft sculptures that evoke a visceral and emotional response, stopping just short of dictating what that response should be.....
Monika Zarzeczna, Curator; Coarse Fragility, Lesley Heller Gallery 2020 Coarse Fragility

Her ceramic sculptures are highly imaginative and technically complex while appearing offhand and unstudied. They transport the viewer … to visit fantastical structures and wander through blasted but weirdly verdant spaces.
Susan M. Vogel, former: Curator of African Art, Metropolitan Museum; director Yale University Art Gallery, 2020

...large bricolage sculptures that are highly constructed and yet seamless autonomous works....As a result, her work represents a dream of playful environments that are other-worldly, lively, biological and urban.
Adam Welch, Director, Greenwich House Pottery, NYC 2017

…Hoffman’s ceramic sculptures use the malleability of clay to evoke ancient, caked, and encrusted organisms arising from primordial ooze.
Jackie Battenfield, curator, Natural Allusions, Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Washington, D.C. 2015

Hoffman’s sculptures and installations are less concerned with the beauty, organization and patterns inherent in nature than with organic growth and exploding past set constraints.* Lisa H
Hatchatorian, curator, Beyond Natural, University of North Texas, Denton, TX. 2013*

…In her installation, Hoffman has transformed our leftovers, creating a wild, visual playground underscored with cultural oddities and subtle humor.
Marion Belanger, curator, Guilford Art Center, (Guilford, CT) 2005

Hoffman has formalized her materials, taking them from a variety of places, so that the industrial objects seem intriguing rather than eyesores.
William Zimmer, The New York Times 2004

Her fascination with making things is evident in the magical way that she combines and constructs disparate elements. Hoffman sees the potential for abject scavenged objects to become something else. It’s as if a crumpled piece of wire calls out to her from the sidewalk, “I’m lively. Take me. I could be something”. Jennifer McGregor, curator, Wave Hill, Bronx, NY 2004

The debris of everyday life forms the basis of Judy Hoffman’s gestural environment. Artistically revitalized salvage materials become metaphors for a rhythmic life flow…C. Mecklen, The General Anzeiger, Bonn, Germany 2004

Hoffman continues to plow nature’s debris and colors into the lively forms and organic surfaces of her increasingly complex environmental installations so that even in downtown Manhattan we never lose that sense of the earth.
Libby Seaberg, Sculpture Magazine 2003. Ground Springs

...a metamorphosis in which ordinary objects from the natural world are combined with everyday man-made objects to become something never seen before... These objects appear caught in mid-movement as they float, fly, dance or wriggle through their unique microcosms.
Christina Kallery, Metrotimes, Detroit, MI. 2003 www.metrotimes.com/arts/nature-and-un-n…

…assemblages that are more than the sum of their curiously complementary parts…This intervention both unifies the parts and asserts [Hoffman’s] ability to transform such castoffs.
Helen A. Harrison, The New York Times 2002

...a personal favorite is hard to choose, but this writer’s may be Hoffman’s Wild Book from handmade papers whose cover sprouts a tangle of woody shoots, clutching finger-like at the surrounding space.
Deborah Everett, NY Arts 2000

Hoffman’s collection of manipulated found objects, combines natural and man-made elements in uneasy equilibrium, as if engaged in a struggle for dominance.
Helen A. Harrison, The New York Times 1999

Fashioning strands of seaweed, pine cones, straw, handmade paper, bits of litter, and seedpods into little boats, nests, traps and nameless things, Growing Wild is a cumulative installation composed of countless small parts.
Kim Levin, “Voice Choices,” Village Voice 1997

(Hoffman’s) sculptures created a sense of colorful, highly personal microcosms.
Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times 1997