Robert Hudson at the Sonoma County Museum of Art

Although Robert Hudson is most widely known for the formally and syntactically complex polychrome steel sculpture that he executed during the 1960s and '70s, he has also distinguished himself as a painter and a ceramist, creating an expansive body of work predicated on a virtuoso balancing of radically divergent forms, materials and connotations. His recent 28-year retrospective, titled "Robert Hudson: The Sonoma County Years," revealed that he sustained his idiosyncratic focus after relocating to the small northern California town of Cotati in 1976.

The exhibition consisted of a snug installation of 39 objects, including close to a dozen acrylic and collage works on paper. These revealed Hudson's improvisational artistic process in germinal form, showing his penchant for surrealist-derived juxtaposition. One of the exhibition's high points was a large painting titled Out of the Blue (1980-81). It featured bright chromatics and abrupt jumps between illusionistic space and graphical surfaces, similar to such features in his sculpture. The work's multivalent pictorial architecture, based on crisp arcs flooded with gradations of bright color, is grandly expansive, and is only minimally elaborated with the attachment to the canvas of two found objects (a chair and a small plastic tree).

Most of the sculpture from this period tends to be complicated, featuring multiple layers and involuted forms of welded and twisted steel painted in brilliant enamel hues. A freestanding, quasi-figurative polychrome steel sculpture from 1987, titled Line of Sight, shows Hudson at his most playful, recklessly jumping from generously extruded shapes to colorful surfaces. He added found objects such as an ax, which looks as though it was plunged into the sculpture's head.

Particularly striking were 11 intimately scaled ceramic works made from multiple components fashioned out of glazed porcelain. A typical example is Pot with Ball (2000), featuring trompe I'oeil pieces of wood and a silver cup set on an upturned jar, contrasted with rough surfaces sporting graphic imprints. Like Hudson's other ceramic works, this piece was a small masterpiece of fused improbabilities brought together with a sleight of hand at once irreverent and artfully delicate.

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