Chicago-based painter/designer/sculpture artist, Cody Hudson (who recently collaborated with Juxtapoz in Miami during Basel week) is showing new works along with Tessa Puretz at Guerrero Gallery in SF starting on March 11.
Referencing a peculiar religious broadcast that the artist encountered on his family’s television as a child, Worship for Shut–Ins (Good Feeling) presents new paintings and sculptures at Guerrero Gallery by Chicago-based artist Cody Hudson. Over the last two years, Hudson has developed a more decidedly painterly approach to his work, eschewing the earlier graphic-based paintings that employed drawing with graphite and ink over colorful surfaces on panel for succinct compositions of elemental shape and more expressive application of paint on linen. The results are bold, unique, and more directly tied to narrative and the natural world.
The recent works of Tessa Perutz have taken her travels as a point of departure, creating landscape paintings that pull from a trip to Iceland or her paintings featured for this exhibition that employ excursions taken in and around the Bay Area while here for a residency. Perutz’s paintings first take shape with adventures to novel wildernesses outside the reaches of the city, which then become the subjects of gestural and alluringly simple drawings made while on site. Armed with this new library of source material, Perutz takes to translating these impressions into paint, using the drawing as a roadmap for translating unquantifiable experiences into emotive fields of color and line work, creating a new journey for the viewer upon the painting’s exhibition. As a native Chicagoan who now calls New York home, her unique perspective within the Bay Area as a relative outsider provides tantalizing views for both locals and newfound visitors alike. They’re reminders of the sublime power vested within our natural surroundings and the west coast vista at large – elements of our local experience too often compartmentalized and forgotten in the hustle and bustle of a daily urban existence. Yet while Perutz’s featured paintings reference locations of immediate proximity, her formal decisions – namely the simplification of landmasses and bodies of water into organic forms of a single hue, allow for a beguiling universality thereby creating new landscapes for a democratic imagination.
