NYAB Event - Tom Judd "Configurations"

Tom Judd "Configurations"

William Holman Gallery

This event has ended.

As an interpreter of the memories and allegories of modern life, Tom Judd's recent monumental canvases and drawings focus on the architecture and chattel of Modernism, exploring our fading cultural memories of this era, embodied by these once early modern buildings that have surrendered their immaculate facades to the effects of time, appearing now obsolete and abandoned.

In these new works, Judd considers the modernist architecture that saturated his childhood. AS these buuildings age, and leave our contemporary life they enter the the realm of memory and symbol. The allegory begins with Judd's own family's "modern" pink house built in the hills near Salt Lake City, where Judd was raised. The allegory expands in seven other paintings of 20th Century houses by Breuer, Mies van der Rohe, Neutra and others. The iconic buildings float in unstable, intangible space, as desolate as Hopper streetscapes. While the modern house was conceived as a monumental and functional trophy of a new way of life, it has become in time a symbol of the lonely and isolated passages of modern life.

As Tom Judd explained:

I grew up in the 60s in a pink cinder block house with large windows, a patio with a rock garden and an open carport. Although the design was influenced by the ideas of early modern architecture, the house had none of the attention to detail; it lacked the refinement and subtleties characteristic of the period's great architects. Yet, for its time, the house was a bold statement and embraced exotic ideas about the future.

My parents built the house in 1958. I remember a picture of my father standing in an empty field in 1957, architectural drawings under his arm, anticipating the ground breaking and imagining living in a "Modern House."

....This series of paintings reflects my love of early modern architecture, the ideas it represented, the sheer beauty of the "objects." These buildings and their designers represented the audacity of the belief that architecture could make a difference, that it could affect not only where we live, but how. This speaks to an unbridled belief in man's ability to imagine and design his future.

Over time however, these once startlingly simple and forward-thinking designs now appear almost quaint, as antiques from a by-gone era. Judd notes that there is a "nostalgia for a nobler time (the past always seems nobler), when the giants of architecture roamed the earth with their ideas of Utopia."

Judd has described these paintings as portraits, floating in space, returned to a world of dreams, in homage to a time of great ideas, from a distance. "They are beautiful things," Judd said, "left out in the rain."

Tom Judd lives and works in Philadelphia.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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