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Robert Hudson
Sculpture
American
(Salt Lake City, Utah, 1938 - )


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Biography

Robert Hudson was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1938. His family settled in Richland, Washington in 1948 and during elementary and high school, he became close friends with artists William T. Wiley and William Allen. Hudson earned a BFA (1961) and MFA (1963) from San Francisco Art Institute. During the early 1970s, he collaborated with ceramic artist Richard Shaw in Stinson Beach. Hudson has taught at various institutions including the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Berkeley. Hudson’s works are in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Museum of Modern Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, SFMOMA, and the Stedelijk Museum. This will be the third work by Hudson to enter the SJMA collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

For the past four decades, Bay Area artist Robert Hudson has constructed hundreds of spatially and formally complex sculptures using found objects and movable elements, which he paints in an assortment of brilliant colors. Not surprisingly, Hudson began his career as a painter at the California School of Fine Arts, where he worked in the style of abstract expressionism espoused at the time. But Hudson eventually found painting on canvas too limiting and he “turned to making exuberant assemblages … with their surfaces brightly painted in a crazy-quilt of colors,” which according to art critic Thomas Albright, “brought to mind an explosion in a comic book factory.”1

Hudson was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1938 and he moved with his family to Richland, Washington, at age ten. While attending public schools there, he met lifelong friends William T. Wiley and William Allan. Together they enrolled in high school art classes taught by Jim McGrath, who encouraged them to experiment with a variety of media and nurtured their interest in Native American cultures of the Pacific Northwest. Hudson then enrolled at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in 1957, where he pursued abstract expressionist painting before turning his attention to steel sculpture and found-object assemblages.

Fly By (1965) is typical of Hudson’s large-scale steel sculptures from the 1960s. Inspired by David Smith—a pioneer of modernist metal sculpting in America—Hudson learned to fabricate sculpture using materials generally considered “industrial.” The ambiguous forms of his early steel sculptures became more complex when Hudson began experimenting with malleable metals, which he retrieved from the Sierra Nevada foothills. The unusual organic forms that Hudson created in works like Fly By were a direct result of his new metalworking technique. “I heat [the metal] up with a torch and then I can fold it like soft clay,” Hudson once explained. “It wrinkles and folds over like dough, or like honey off a spoon.”2 In Fly By, Hudson exploits this newfound approach with his typical, exuberant panoply of color, which drips down the sculpture’s surfaces. His sculptures from this era have also been compared to work of Joan Miró and Arshile Gorky, both of whom were noted for their energetic, sensuous use of line, gestural brushstroke, and bold use of color.3 Works such as Fly By helped to establish the archetypal look of Bay Area funk art of the late 1960s, which was ultimately characterized as slick, bright, and unabashedly eccentric.4

In the late 1960s, Hudson embarked on a collaborative project with Bay Area ceramic artist Richard Shaw, using porcelain as their primary medium. Hudson’s proclivity for porcelain manifested itself in the proliferation of hundreds of molds he made from objects gathered in the studio or during his visits to thrift shops. Not content with conventional pottery forms or glazing techniques, Hudson’s work evolved into highly complex amalgamations of painted, bisque-fired forms and found objects that he affixed to one other—a combination that rendered a dynamic tension between illusion and reality. During the 1980s and 1990s, Hudson’s output ranged from vibrantly colored works on paper, paintings, and assemblages to large-scale steel, bronze, and ceramic sculptures.

Red E (2003) signals Hudson’s recent focus on ceramic sculpture, while many elements of the work have been a part of his artistic vocabulary for years. At its foundation is a nonfunctional bowl, upon which trompe l’oeil tree branches are propped, referring to Hudson’s lifelong love of nature and the wilderness. The title Red E wittily refers to one of his earlier pieces from 2002 titled Red and Blue. Topping the sculpture is an abstract animal head, described by the artist as a dog or fox. The ambiguous canine figure shares certain buglike features—including a barrel-shaped head and ears composed from glass plate shards—with Hudson’s Fat Gnat sculpture from 1964. Finally, a geometric grid extends mysteriously from the top of the piece offering a playful reference to formalist abstraction’s predilection for grids, as well as a structured place from which to map the artwork’s meaning.

The dynamic composition of Red E, with its vibrant and exuberant coloring, might at first appear as a wacky machine “ready” to jolt into action. Not surprisingly, however, Hudson hesitates to divulge the significance of the object’s meaning, preferring that viewers compose their own story. Certainly, the hundreds of dazzling, multilayered works Hudson has created over the course of his career provide plenty of provocative clues. —A.W.

1. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 149.
2. Robert Hudson: A Survey Exhibition, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1985), 11.
3. Ibid., 10.
4. Albright, 127.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Robert Hudson is a leading figure in West Coast sculpture, known for his polychrome welded steel sculptures and found object assemblages. Using industrial materials and moveable elements, he constructs spatially complex forms with brightly painted surfaces. Before turning to sculpture, Hudson began his career as a painter in the style of abstract expressionism. His characteristic use of bold, primary colors plays with the three-dimensionality of his sculptures, visually flattening their surfaces onto the same plane. Simultaneously, Hudson’s combination of varied forms and textures of found objects and geometrically-shaped steel amplifies their multifaceted spatial arrangement. As art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes, “There is a kind of dreamlike abstract logic to these works, a blend of nonchalance and inevitability that can be best understood, I believe, in terms of a radical coming to grips with the medium.”

Hudson’s large and distinguished body of work includes ceramics, paintings, and drawings. The drawing Untitled is a study in pale blue and neutral tan—colors Hudson uses in his sculptural works to balance more assertive reds and yellows. Roughly divided into halves by a dark, ink-heavy vertical band, Untitled comprises geometric and abstract imagery within a formal layout. Circles and orbs figure prominently within the drawing—a symbol of Earth repeated in Hudson’s work. Untitled was created during a period when Hudson turned, briefly, from steel to focus primarily on ceramics that he made in collaboration with Bay Area ceramicist Richard Shaw, marking a transition in his artistic development to more compositionally complex sculptures, paintings, and drawings.

This drawing would join three Hudson sculptures and a painting from the same year in the collection.

Biography
Robert Hudson was born in Salt Lake City in 1938. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute where he received a BFA in 1957 and an MFA in 1963. Hudson, along with his contemporaries, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, and William T. Wiley, was included in Peter Selz’s historic exhibition, FUNK, at the Berkeley Art Museum in 1967. A major retrospective of Hudson’s work was mounted at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1993, and in 2005. His work is included in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has taught at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, San Francisco Art Institute, University of California, Berkeley, and University of California, Davis. In 2014, he received the prestigious Lee Krasner Award for a lifetime or artistic achievement. Hudson lives and works in Cotati, CA. (acquisitions meeting November 6, 2017)


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