COLOGNE.- Zander Galerie opened an exhibition of work by New York-based artist Don Dudley, featuring early and recent works on paper complemented by a modular wall installation. Known since the 1960s for transcending abstract painting by embracing industrial materials such as lacquer spray paint and aluminium, Dudley’s practice bridges the divide between Minimalist art movements of the American East and West Coasts. The clear-cut shapes and colours in Dudley’s oeuvre are rich in underlying complexity and continue to explore the perception of form, dimen­sionality, and space.

Born in Los Angeles in 1930, Dudley studied at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he was influenced by Abstract Expressionist painting. Through the 1960s, he worked and taught in Southern California, becoming associated with the Finish Fetish school and West Coast Modernism. Dudley taught drawing at Chouinard Art Institute and, invited by famed curator and museum director Walter Hopps, at the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art. He went on to work as curator himself at the La Jolla Art Museum. His first exhibition featured John Baldessari, who was still a graduate student then.

Dudley continued his exploration of perceptual ambiguity through drawing, creating drawings with prismatic effects. But soon he decided that he wanted to move beyond drawing. Californian artists like Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman and John McCracken were moving away from conventional artistic materials and practices, using metal, spray guns, finding ways to make luminous surfaces using lacquers, automobile paint and synthetic resins to make luminous surfaces. Dudley, however, worked towards a more subliminal experience, an abstraction beyond reference to the everyday.

Through a process of experimentation with slightly convex aluminium shapes – and after relocating to New York – he discovered his signature thin vertical aluminium modules, which he used to com­pose evenly spaced wall pieces varying in colour combinations and the number of modules. While Dudley’s wall pieces are present and object-like, they also retain a floating quality, hovering between two and three dimensions just before the wall, held in place by the empty spaces between the modules like intervals between notes. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he further explored modular structures as well as spatial installa­tions. As Dudley stated, his aspiration is “to have my work function on a subliminal level, both in the sense of operating below the threshold of consciousness, and in the sense of producing a feeling of awe, the sublime. … I have always aspired to the wordless condition of music, using the simplest possible means, nothing hidden.”

In Dudley’s recent works on paper, on view is a selection from 2014 to 2023, dynamic forces are at play: planes and elements seem to overlap, intersect, and fold across each other. He used airbrush and mixed media techniques for the vibrant and at times gradient colours, creating metallic lustre or spatial effects. Like the earlier drawings, these also complement a series of wall pieces using different, partly painted materials. Drawings have always been an integral part of his practice, reflecting the continuing evolution of Dudley’s practice characterised by an interaction of formal rigour, aesthetic poetry and sheer visual experience.

Don Dudley’s work has been presented in exhibitions since 1958. By 1972 had shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition Contemporary American Painting in 1972, and the MoMA P.S. 1 exhibition Special Projects in 1982. His work is in numerous public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum, New York; and the Dallas Museum of Art.