Audra Skuodas (1940-2019) was born in Lithuania but spent most of her life painting in Oberlin, Ohio, where her husband, John Pearson, also a painter, taught. As if recapitulating the journeys of earlier abstractionists, Skuodas gradually shed figurative elements in favor of delicate pink and blue patterns of dots and sinuous lines. Unlike her predecessors, however, Skuodas wasn’t using her ethereal geometries to transcend earthly pain. She was drilling into it, particularly in the floating, blood-red almond shapes of her 1990s “Womb Wound” series.
Image: from left, Audra Skuodas’s “Vibrational Vulnerability — Weaving Hands,” 1999; “Untitled (Snake and Lingham),” 1990; and “Womb Wounds Series 1999,” from 1999, at Cristin Tierney Gallery x Abattoir Gallery. Credit... Jeenah Moon for The New York Times
