Developed between 2010 and 2015, Birth of the Universe marks one of the most ambitious and cosmologically charged bodies of work in Judith Bernstein's long career. Comprising eighteen large-scale oil paintings – first shown at The Box LA in 2013, then under blacklight at Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York in 2014, and later incorporated into her 2015 show at the Mary Boone Gallery – the series sees Bernstein expand her trademark psychosexual imagery to literally galactic proportions.

The series grew out of Bernstein’s fascination with advances in science and astronomy, and their relationship to the ever-shifting dynamics between women and men. The result is a cosmology that is distinctly hers: fluorescent and rich oil paint evokes the chaos, violence, and nuclear explosion of the big bang, with the rage of the ‘active cunt’ positioned as the primal source of the expanding universe. 

Drifting through the vacuum of the canvas, angrily birthing galaxies, are the cuntfaces – vagina mouth, sphincter chin, two ejaculating cock-shaped eyestalks – while the disembodied threads of Bernstein’s famous screws spiral like single-helix strips of RNA. Mysterious black holes, nooses, teeth, clocks, crown jewels, and arbitrary numbers populate the compositions, weaving together subliminal themes of pleasure and pain, sex and death, within a framework that is simultaneously absurdist and deeply serious.

Bernstein has spoken of the series as a reckoning with women’s rage, drawing on her involvement in feminist groups and her own personal history, channelled into something that carries both deadly seriousness and humour. The series confirmed Bernstein, long under-recognised despite decades of provocative, politically charged work, as a singular voice, willing to fuse the cosmic and the corporeal, the feminist and the farcical, into paintings of genuine power.