Galleries One & Two
In Paul Nudd’s show, Nudd’s fourth with the gallery, will present selections from four bodies of ongoing work – Mutant humanoid drawings; mutant portrait paintings; sputtering goo video; plus a 20 page catalog of the artist’s sketches.
Paul Nudd is a prolific artist. His output is not just a symptom of an artist and how he uses his time, but a central motif in the work itself, in keeping with the unchanged central themes of the work: primal sludge, growth and disease, systems of classification, mutation and life; patterning and mark making, too.
Nudd’s figure drawings are cartoonishly terrifying mutants, alien/human mash-ups besotted with tumors, warts, lesions, growths, male and female genitalia and mis-placed pubic hair spawn from a boatload (the artist’s word) of popular cultural forms: cartooning, horror, sci-fi, psychedelia etc, movies like “The Fly”, “Dead Alive”, “The Toxic Avenger” and The Thing from the Fantastic and canonical visual artists like Paul McCarthy, Öyvind Fahlström, Peter Saul, Ivan Albright and of course, Jim Nutt. A sub-series of new drawings are smaller; adolescent sized, or juveniles, less developed, but in the process of mutating. The exaggerated physical characteristics of puberty are showcased in these drawings – armpit hair, rampant acne, overall asymmetry, misshapen breasts, pubic hair, enlarged genitalia, gender confusion, hormonal shifts, mood swings abd erections. In these works, the repetition of pea-green and small internal lumps reference the pituitary gland, an adolescent’s albatross, here forming into something unhealthy, or dirty: a tumor.
Nine new videos presented on vintage monitors denote a return to lo-fi form, now with significant color shifts, durations and shorter cuts, and faster editing. The videos are endless cycles of spastic rupturing gunk and goo, reflecting Nudd’s artistic practice as a whole; a return of the repressed primal urge.
Paul Nudd’s mixed-media paintings on canvas offer up images of head-like entities emerging from colorful gobs of compositional grounds composed of thick swaths of paint. Nudd describes them as “portraits of people made out of paint.” The portraits appear to be inside-out, with seemingly random, yet tightly composed, areas heavily textured collage, what he calls “material cannibalism”, or a self-contained, enclosed system of the use of highly specific, yet arbitrary textured materials.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a 20 page catalog of the artist’s sketches, xeroxed on colored paper with a screenprinted cover with hand coloring in an edition of 100 and a CD that collects the artists infrequent sound works and in an edition of 100. AND frequent collaborator Keith Herzik designed a poster for the show.