Seven new sculptures by veteran Bay Area artist Robert Hudson will be presented as the opening show of the fall season at Frank Lloyd Gallery. Hudson, well-known for his polychrome steel sculpture, has been a primary force in the West Coast assemblage movement. The seven new works combine cast iron, steel, stainless steel, enamel and epoxy in a complex, layered hybrid form. Robert Hudson's work has always been a combination of painting and sculpture, and though it is formally complex, there is a stunning lucidity to the composition.
Hudson is the progenitor of the current penchant for sampled, hybrid art formed from disparate sources. His pioneering work with assemblage dates to the early 1960s. His work has appeared in dozens of major exhibitions and was first shown in Los Angeles at Nicholas Wilder gallery in 1967.
For the last four decades, Robert Hudson has been known for his large-scale welded-steel and poly-chromed steel and bronze sculptures. The San Francisco Bay area artist has also produced a large body of paintings and drawings during a distinguished career. Based in the assemblage sculpture and Funk movements in California during the late 1950s and 1960s, Hudson has consistently presented spatially and formally complex work, most often characterized by found objects, wit and irony.
Hudson has exhibited since 1961, and his work is included in The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Modern Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Stedelijk Museum. Writing about earlier Hudson work, the critic Peter Schjeldahl has noted:
"There is a kind of dreamlike abstract logic to these works, a blend of non-chalance and inevitability that can be best understood, I believe, in terms of a radical coming to grips with the medium."