Falling in line with a modish trend on the biennial circuit, this edition of Front includes some dead artists, the best of which is Audra Skuodas, who passed away in 2019. Born in Lithuania in 1940, she arrived in Oberlin after a period as a refugee and spent much of her career in the town. The works she produced feature spindly bodies whose forms torque beneath ovular shapes that she termed “wounds.” Beneath some of them are mysterious inscriptions written in prim half-cursive: “The less vulnerable, the less poisonous to vibration, the denser the aggregate, the deader the matter, the less responsive to consciousness,” reads one. By the end of her career, Skuodas had eschewed these surreal images and texts entirely, but the wounds remained, repeating and rearranging to form mesmerizing abstractions. Though Skuodas’s work can be seen at Front venues in Cleveland and Akron, it is the art in her Oberlin studio, which is open by appointment, that makes the best case for her as a seriously underrated artist (outside Ohio, at least). A Skoudas retrospective ought to be in order.
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