Anti-Flat

[Image: By Gerry Judah].

Artist Gerry Judah‘s paintings are massively and aggressively three-dimensional, piling up, away, and out from the canvas to form linked cities, ruins, and debris-encrusted bridges, like reefs.

[Images: By Gerry Judah].

They are perhaps what a tectonic collaboration between Lebbeus Woods and Jackson Pollock might produce: blasted and collapsing landscapes so covered in white it’s as if nuclear winter has set in.

[Image: By Gerry Judah].

As the short film included below makes clear, Judah embeds entire architectural models in each piece, affixing small constellations of buildings to the canvas before beginning a kind of archaeological onslaught: layering paint on top of paint, raining strata down for days to seal the landscape in place and make it ready for wall-mounting.

And then the paintings go up, sprawling and counter-gravitational, like ruins tattooed on the walls.

[Image: By Gerry Judah].

For more work—including pieces executed in red and black—see Judah’s website (including his bio, which suggests larger architectural and theatrical influences).

(Thanks to Jim Rossignol for the tip!)

4 thoughts on “Anti-Flat”

  1. Ornamentation through geometric articulation. Simply put, this type of art is fantastic in the way it literally jumps off the canvas containing multiple vantage points to appreciate the art. I am interested in what the artist thinks about per different lighting situations also.

    I agree, I would love to appreciate some of these pieces in a gallery.

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