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ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce I Have No One But You, a solo exhibition of new painting and sculpture by Cody Hudson in Galleries One and Two. The exhibition continues through Saturday, August 29, 2020.

Employing a palette of bright terracotta, rusty brown, ochre, pinks, and deep blues, Cody Hudson has produced a new series of paintings and sculptures that embrace a strong sense of narrative while remaining compositionally mysterious. While the imagery in his newest paintings continues to mine the natural world, the results push further from obvious connotations into a more transcendent poetic visual space. They are informed as much by the artist’s inner reflections as they are his external environs. With peculiar hovering and overlapping shapes and inverted or cropped symbols, they hint at a deeper phenomenological approach to looking. They are multi-layered, visual recollections of the artist’s own personal experiences.

Hudson presents ten new paintings as well as three large freestanding and four small tabletop sculptures in Gallery One. Several of the paintings are amongst the biggest the artist has produced to date. They are expressive and painterly in their contemplative line work and bold colorful shapes. Hudson has also begun to employ multiple intersecting planes of steel in his largest sculptures. The results add new dimensionality and figuration to their odd forms, situating them more substantially in a real lived-in space.

In Gallery Two, the artist has covered the back wall from floor to ceiling with a site-specific painting, on which another freestanding painting, in the very same dense composition and bringing to mind a thicket of exotic foliage, hangs. The results are visually perplexing and suggest the zooming in and overlaying of repeated imagery that might be found on a computer screen. Many of the walls in both galleries have been painted in companion colors to the work, bringing a vibrant environmental component to the entire exhibition.

Hudson’s titles for his works in this exhibition often feel like deeply confessional responses to ongoing metaphysical and ontological questions. They capture his oscillating feelings of loneliness, hopefulness, darkness, positivity, love of family, self-reflection, and isolation. His exhibition was originally scheduled to open in mid-April and was postponed because of the coronavirus outbreak. As a result, some of the works were completed under a very different set of circumstances.

‘These paintings were started before COVID-19 in Chicago, and a handful of them were finished during quarantine in Sugar Creek, Wisconsin. So, the paintings and their respective titles also took different turns for me in what they were about. Some of them that felt lighter at the beginning became darker in their final exploration.’ – C.H.

CODY HUDSON (American, b. 1971) lives and works in Chicago. He has had recent solo exhibitions at 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). Recent group exhibitions include Joshua Liner Gallery (New York, NY), Chicago Artist Coalition (Chicago, IL), Chicago Design Museum (Chicago, IL), Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Lamington Drive (Collingwood, Australia), and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (Grand Rapids, MI). Hudson has been exhibited widely at art fairs in Chicago and Copenhagen. His work is in numerous private and public collections.

• Alan Pocaro, ‘Temporary Relief: A Review of Cody Hudson at Andrew Rafacz’, Newcity Art, July 13 2020 (PDF)