In art ltd in 2011, James Yood wrote of Paul Nudd, “If the body is a temple, Nudd offers it as crumbling and collapsing, as an amazing remnant soon to be food for very busy worms.” Nudd is committed to central themes of primal sludge, growth and disease, systems of classification, mutation and life, patterning and mark making.
Paul Nudd’s work —paintings, drawings, prints, comics, and increasingly, ceramics — worldview, walks the line between cautionary apocalyptic tale and orgiastic revelry. His canvases are littered with malformed phosphorescent fetal forms and prenatal neo-punk youngsters of varying size, mass and scale that expressionistically exhume the unnatural falsehoods that exist at our most plasmic level. Nudd’s sludge runs slow and deep as artificially colored, viscous high-fructose globs of amniotic fluid pumped up on bovine growth chemicals and quasi-natural anti-caking agents. Through a scope that allows viewers to experience the imperceptible dilemma of our collective degrading existences, Nudd proclaims that the very essence of the human condition is fake.
Paul Nudd has had solo shows in Berlin, Detroit, Portland, OR, Brooklyn, Kansas City, Raleigh, NC and in Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center, Bodybuilder & Sportsmen, and Dogmatic. His work has been included in group shows in Dusseldorf, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Houston, Denver and was included in Seeing Is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His prodigious zine work can be found in several national artist book collections including the Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Newark Public Library; National Academy of Design, New York; Indiana University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Paul Nudd received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2001. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and he lives in Berwyn, Illinois.