Advancing an expansive and often combinatory approach to histories of abstraction, Carrie Rudd probes the relationship between visual art and language. In Rudd’s vibrant canvases, painting becomes both a form of thinking and a means of rendering moments that elude verbal articulation. Myriad forms of writing – in journals and sketchbooks, or quickly-jotted on notepads – form the basis of an ebullient practice that toggles between set parameters and unfettered improvisation. Rarely seen yet subtly integrated into each work, such preparatory materials – linguistic sketches, perhaps – may also gesture toward painting’s capacity, as Rudd has said, to “convey ideas that originate in the real world, but defy representational form.”

One might also note that language forms a structuring device, a conceptual framework capable of generating new understandings. In conversation with an earlier generation of artists – Charline von Heyl and Rochelle Feinstein immediately come to mind – Rudd approaches abstraction as an inventory of ideas, a set of moves and countermoves to be played out, or against one another, through the act of painting. Cultivating dissonance and incongruity, the artist experiments wildly within predetermined structures and concepts; the resultant paintings erupt with a fevered energy. Unexpected and seemingly incompatible gestures produce a pleasing sense of ambiguity, implicating us in the action or process of the painting. Yet the present-tense nature of these works does not mean they relinquish any sense of resolution. Taking a cue from Philip Guston, Rudd considers and reconsiders each canvas “until it is no longer arbitrary.”

Rudd (b. 1994, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her MFA at Hunter College. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (2024, 2023, 2022); NARANJO 141, Mexico City (2025); Chapter NY, New York (2024); 12.26, Dallas,Texas (2025, 2023); Hunter College, New York (2021, 2019); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2021); and the Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York (2016).