ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of new paintings and sculptures from Cody Hudson and new paintings from Richard Colman, in Galleries One and Two. The exhibition opens Friday, February 17th and continues through Saturday, April 1st, 2023.

With his newest body of work, Cody Hudson continues to mine inspiration from his surroundings, both rural and domestic. For this exhibition he presents a new series of seven acrylic paintings and ten powder coated steel sculptures that were created between his studios in Sugar Creek, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois.

His series of paintings in this exhibition visually shift with the imagery leaning towards a central vignette or focal point, moving away from the edges of the canvas. This moving inward creates a sense of gathering and togetherness, like still lifes of abstracted plant shapes and imagined vistas. Scenes of stacked caps, arches, and circles intermingle and overlap playing with subtle depths and planes amidst pattern.

Hudson’s practice is multifaceted, involving a dynamic editing process between mediums as he moves between drawings, printmaking, sculpture, and public art. In this respect, he propagates new imagery and content through different modes of making, relocating thoughts from one place to another, similarly seen with the works on view throughout Gallery One and Gallery Two. The work speaks between itself evoking a deeply contemplative imagery that builds up and traces a connection deep into the artist’s soul.

Richard Colman presents a new body of work that explores relationships to the self by painting complex labyrinths of hard-edge figuration. His paintings embody tight connections to Pop Art and New Wave culture –moving freely between figuration and abstraction. Colman’s paintings highlight relationships between figure and ground, with recurring motifs of flowers and heads, held between figures gently in their hands or as borders to the image, a poesies and journey through the use of emotive form and color combinations.

Colman explores his own connections to life and death and societal hierarchies through his paintings, which visually call into question perceptual logic. His work weaves thin mazes around body forms next to bold planes of color creating textural differences and depth alongside dynamical gradients that indicate some semblance of life and struggle to stay connected. He poses questions we ask ourselves – typically without words – hinting at and bringing us closer to a deeper phenomenological approach to looking.

CODY HUDSON (American, b. 1971) lives and works in Chicago. He has had recent solo exhibitions at David B Smith Gallery (Denver, CO), Primary (Miami, FL), Mini Galerie (Amsterdam, Netherlands), ANDREW RAFACZ (Chicago, IL), Left Field (San Luis Obispo, CA), HVW8 (Berlin, Germany), and V1 Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark). Group exhibitions include STRAAT Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Chefas Projects (Portland, OR), Joshua Liner Gallery (New York, NY), Chicago Design Museum (Chicago, IL), Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA), and the Somerset House (London, England)). Hudson has been exhibited widely at art fairs in Chicago and Copenhagen. His work is in numerous private and public collections. This is the artist’s eighth exhibition with the gallery.

RICHARD COLMAN (American, b. 1976, Bethesda, Maryland) lives and works between San Francisco, CA and Sandy Hook, CT. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Louis Buhl (Detroit, MI), Bim Bam Gallery (Paris, France), New Image Art (Los Angeles, CA), and V1 Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark). Group exhibitions include Library Street Collective (Detroit, MI), V1 Gallery (Copenhagen, Denmark), and Richard Heller Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Colman has been working as a professional artist for twenty years and has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the world. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.