Gallery One, Chicago
Western Exhibitions is curdled with quivering anticipation to present a survey of prints, zines, illustrations, sacs and ephemera by ONSMITH + NUDD, a collaboration initiated by the cartoonist Onsmith and artist Paul Nudd in 2008.
The collaborative work of Onsmith & Nudd tightens the cleavage between the seemingly disparate worlds of underground comics and contemporary painting. Onsmith & Nudd reject the notion that these approaches to making things differ in any meaningful way, instead opting for a strategy that focuses on an end product that resembles, above all other things, an artificially-thickened quasi-cultural pureé. Everything they plumb from the depths of the diseased and impacted Western cultural colon-womb, from films of questionable artistic merit to “metaphysical German meatloaf”(1), becomes fodder for their cartoon-heavy narrative and figurative conglomerations. Onsmith the cartoonist, a documentarian of modern isolation and purveyor of grim humor, and Nudd the painter of gunk, pox and plasmic filth, have sculpted out of beef-clay a body of work that autonomously bottles and sells its own pungent nectars. The proof, as well as all of the hairs, toenails, and used band-aids, resides in the vats of pudding that comprise this retrospective style exhibition.
The visual cornucopia that the artists refer to as Onsmith Dog Stew & Monkey Nudd Wine consists of more than a few of their favorite things: banana splits, fishing lures, misshapen faces, horse flies, totem poles, spots, battered heads, and beehives, and comes in a variety of different forms: silkscreened prints, lithographs, collage, drawings and sketchbook pages, relief prints, postcards, studio detritus, commissioned illustrations, koozies, and zines. This exhibit contains pretty much everything they have ever made.
ONSMITH + NUDD’s collaborative work has been shown at Spudnik Press, Anchor Graphics and Columbia College, all in Chicago. Their illustrations have been published in “Black Eye” by Rotland Press, they’ve presented work at various books fairs including CAKE in Chicago, Comic Arts Brooklyn and the New York Art Book Fair. Their 2013 lithographic triptych “Beyond the Valley of the Spoils” was written about in Art in Print. Onsmith, an accomplished comic book artist whose work has been disseminated by dozens of publications, lives and works in Chicago. Paul Nudd, a painter, drawer and printmaker who is represented by Western Exhibitions, lives and works in Berwyn, Il.