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Squarecylinder Review
Michele Sudduth @ SFMOMA Artists Gallery
By David M. Roth
Michele Sudduth's painting might easily be described as modernist jigsaw puzzles. With their saturated colors, soothing pastels and interlocking shapes whose symmetries call forth Ellsworth Kelly and Matisse, they playfully riff on the conventions of hard-edged abstraction. The story might begin and end there, were it not for Sudduth’s repeated use of featureless heads and torsos that resemble the robotic figures of early video games.
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Catalog Essay
Michele Sudduth: Painting in a Social Space
by Glen Helfand
. . . bold abstractions full of adventurous color combinations—some energetically flirting with chromatic dissonance—and allusions to the figure, along with a sophisticated psychological charge. . . a specific aesthetic that combines elements of figuration, abstraction, an adventurous sense of color, and a trust in chance strategies. It also expresses a reverence for modernism, particularly in its most colorful forms, and a contemporary pluralism that encompasses the totality of these sources.
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Catalog Essay
Michele Sudduth: Abstracting the Puzzle
by Mark Johnson
. . . rich, formal sophistication of her ambitious abstractions and the multiple ways in which her work dialogs with modernist art history. In his thirty-five ”Sentences on Conceptual Art,” artist Sol LeWitt wrote: “There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.” Sudduth’s most obvious and thus important element is a formal vocabulary of idiosyncratic hard-edge abstraction that employs repeated and often mirrored curvilinear forms. This compositional language harkens back to the 1960s painters associated with Op art, such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and especially Bridget Riley . . .
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Venetian Red Interview
Color in Motion: Michele Sudduth @ SFMOMA Artists Gallery
VR: I’m curious about the origin of this new work and how it evolved.
MS: It actually started about ten years ago with the painting Blue Shift, when I projected the image of a jigsaw puzzle piece over a striped painting and noticed the sense of movement that was created when I shifted the stripes against the puzzle image. But what also fascinated me was the humanizing aspect of the puzzle image. Over the years I've played with that and, most recently, I extracted one single image out of a series of puzzle paintings and used that for this latest body of work.