Hettie Judah

Writer and Art Critic

United Kingdom

Hettie Judah is the chief critic on the daily newspaper the i, a columnist for Apollo magazine, a contributing editor to The Plant, and writes regularly for the Guardian, Vogue, Frieze, the New York Times and a number of magazines with ‘art’ in the title. Recent and upcoming books include Lapidarium (John Murray/ Penguin, 2022), How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022), Frida Kahlo (Laurence King, 2020) and Art London (ACC Art Books, 2019). She is currently working on a Hayward Touring exhibition and book on art and motherhood.

Portfolio
Apollo Magazine
08/30/2022
The politics of portraying parenthood | Apollo Magazine

From the September 2022 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. I was arrested by the breast. Full, slack, laced with veins the liverish grey of an ebbing bruise, it erupts through pristine white cotton, the head above cropped from view. Locked on to its nipple is a baby, not fully unfurled, drowsily satisfied.

inews.co.uk
09/08/2022
Vagina scrolls and tongue-kissing with cats: Carolee Schneemann is one of art's great rebels

I find myself writing about a dirty movie. In Carolee Schneemann's Fuses (1964-67) the artist and her partner James Tenney have sex in various unhurried ways, coupling on the bed or off it, enjoying the touch of skin, tasting one another, pausing to rest. Schneemann films her partner's penis with affectionate curiosity, stiffening then slumping.

The Economist
07/29/2022
Manifesta 14 reinvigorates neglected spaces in Kosovo's capital

M aking his way to the roof of the 13-storey Grand Hotel Pristina, Petrit Halilaj points out abandoned bedrooms piled high with junk. The artist climbs a spindly metal ladder, then stands amid the signage of this once five-star establishment. Manifesta, Europe's nomadic art biennial, opened in Pristina, Kosovo's capital, on July 22nd.

Artnet News
07/27/2022
Manifesta Wants to Bring the Roving Art Biennial to Ukraine-and Have Former Host Cities 'Adopt'...

Though the latest edition of Manifesta just opened this month , plans are already underway for a forthcoming iteration of the roving European biennial to take place in Ukraine. Last week, at a press conference inaugurating Manifesta 14 in Pristina, Kosovo, the 18-year-old event's founder and director Hedwig Fijen said she is proposing a 2028 iteration of the show in Kyiv.

the Guardian
06/21/2022
Artist Penny Goring: 'David Bowie showed me that there was another world'

he floor beneath Penny Goring's worktable is awash in filaments and fragments of scarlet cloth. Slivers and snippets carry across the carpet in crimson eddies, as though blood had spilled from her stabbing scissors and is seeping across the floor of her bedroom into the world beyond.

Apollo Magazine
05/30/2022
The creative freedom of play | Apollo Magazine

A memorable video at this year's Biennale - Venice Children's Game #29: La roue (2021) - shows a boy patiently pushing a tyre up a mountain of dark slag before curling his body inside and pitching himself downhill.

Apollo Magazine
04/28/2022
Men framed by women's desire | Apollo Magazine

I n the opening room of 'Fashioning Masculinities' at the V&A, the god Apollo is joined by Hercules, Hermes and archetypes of loveliness, ancient and modern. Strolling past velvety male nudes, shot with the perfecting haziness of a lover's eye by the likes of George Platt Lynes or Isaac Julien, I experienced a revelation.

the Guardian
05/16/2022
Glyn Philpot review - a master portraitist's secret gay passion

ashion elevated Glyn Philpot, but it also cast him aside. Before and after the first world war, Philpot painted the spirited lovelies - suited or skirted - of London's high society. He died unexpectedly shortly before the next war. By the time the dust of that conflict settled, his silken party people looked outmoded, remnants of times past.

inews.co.uk
04/26/2022
Sonia Boyce: 'If you're female, you have to be nice'

This weekend, Sonia Boyce was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation: the Venice Biennale's top honour. She is not only the first black woman to represent Britain in the national pavilion, but the first British artist to win the award in 29 years.

the Guardian
05/05/2022
Socks, squats and sex workers: The Woman in the Window review

ho is the woman in the window? A housebound mother leaning out to gossip? A lover waiting for a letter? A sex worker summoning clients? An artist installing work in a gallery? As this tightly structured show reveals, the convention of showing women positioned at a window dates back millennia.

the Guardian
05/03/2022
Ingrid Pollard: the Turner nominee uncovering Britain's secret shame - review

ith detailed studies of flaking, iron-blooded rock, printed at monumental scale Ingrid Pollard directs our thoughts to the bigger picture. The title of her show, Carbon Slowly Turning, might describe the motion of the spinning Earth, with you, me, the trees and other carbon-based life upon it.

Apollo Magazine
04/05/2022
The problem with art writing | Apollo Magazine

The visual art world is getting textier and textier. Few institutional exhibitions now come without captioning lengthier than a parliamentary report. The more self-important commercial galleries publish weighty catalogues, show by show, to communicate museum-like gravitas and spin saleable tales around their artists.

inews.co.uk
05/21/2022
Cornelia Parker at the Tate reveals a career-long fascination with violence

Cornelia Parker's major installations have immediate arresting drama. You "get" them instinctively. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) is a Semtexed garden shed, arrested nanoseconds after detonation. Perpetual Canon (2004) is a ghostly brass band, silenced by the flattening impact of a roller.

inews.co.uk
05/19/2022
God is a woman: the thrilling Feminine Power at the British Museum is proof

British Museum curator Belinda Crerar is standing beneath a naked woman with skin the colour of a peat bog. Positioned about three metres up the wall, the woman is crouching as though ready to pounce. Crerar looks up at her admiringly: this is Lilith, "a demon from Jewish mysticism - though she has a much longer history," she tells me.

inews.co.uk
04/07/2022
Sheila Hicks: 'My works need to be touched!'

On a blustery, drizzly Yorkshire day, I am tempted to throw myself into a mountain of billowy-soft bales of coloured fibre and hibernate until the sun comes back. Sheila Hicks has provided the cushiony, downy, pillowy mountain of my dreams - part of the finale to her show at Hepworth Wakefield.

inews.co.uk
11/30/2021
Lubaina Himid at Tate Modern is rich and involving, with a political kick

One of my favourite works by Lubaina Himid is comparatively modest. Man in a Shirt Drawer (2017-18) juts from the wall like a fragment of junk shop furniture - you have to approach sideways to see a painting there at all. It is art that literally forces you to adopt a certain position to step into its space.

inews.co.uk
10/11/2021
Noguchi at the Barbican is a treat - despite resembling a posh furniture display room

Of all the facets of Isamu Noguchi's career - sculptor, landscape architect, designer - it is the Japanese-American artist's humanism that sticks in the mind after this show. From early on, Noguchi's interest in exploring modern forms and technique in sculpture was balanced by an obligation to work for the public good.

the Guardian
05/31/2022
'Sleep with everyone! Be embarrassing!' - the dada baroness who shocked society

owering over crowds at the Venice Biennale, a fortysomething woman poses in a wild homemade costume, that includes beribboned matador pants and a hat like an upturned saucepan. In another photo, smaller and taken around 1920, she crouches on one leg like a stork, sprouting feathers and dripping jewellery.

the Guardian
05/18/2022
Jesse Darling: Enclosures review - part public toilet, part CCTV-infested hellscape

rtist-poet Jesse Darling's recent survey show at Modern Art Oxford took a swipe at the tidy authority of museum displays. Glass-topped cabinets teetered and slumped into corners, metal stands refused to do just that, and an exuberant - if terrifying - rollercoaster sculpture looped the upper reaches before unravelling into splayed track.