Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to announce The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, an exhibition of new paintings by Carrie Rudd, on view from October 14 through November 15, 2025.

With her essayistic approach to abstract painting, Carrie Rudd dexterously edits together an idiosyncratic yet relatable collection of episodes drawn from personal experience. Although she works with the tools of a medium conventionally understood as expressive, she methodically investigates ideas grounded in language. Culling pop and personal reference into the lexicon of formalist modernism, Rudd carries forward the work of an earlier generation of artists – one thinks particularly of Rochelle Feinstein, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl – who have reconsidered the possibilities for abstraction since the advent of contemporary art. Like these artists, Rudd undercuts the heroism of high-modernism by injecting her works with humor, doubt, disharmony; she sets up a number of binaries – between abstraction and representation or, in tenor, between gravity and levity – just to confuse them. Approaching each canvas as a particular problem or question to work through, the artist fluctuates between thinking and feeling, another binary made false in Rudd’s hands, as well as between predetermined compositional forms and spontaneous gestures. One suspects that Rudd’s notions may function like hypotheses, ideas tested by the process of painting. Is form like thought? Is texture like feeling? How could color factor into this equation? In part, this method draws from something like conceptual synesthesia, in which theoretical abstractions – mathematical formulas, for example, or units of time – appear visually.

At the same time, it would be incorrect to reduce these works to the realm of pure visualization. Rudd has said that her work in painting initially stemmed from her writing practice, which she maintains, furtively, as part of her studio process. The question of what painting can do, and what linguistic articulation cannot, always hovers nearby. Leaning on language while paradoxically seeking to eliminate it, her paintings ask if it’s possible to develop thoughts without words. In this conflict, there is an overarching sense of dark comedy that exceeds exact verbalization – the clash of deep, emotive hues against bright pops of color, the disruption of an AbEx field by a cartoonish blob. Yet words occasionally emerge, and might help us, as viewers, understand why we find some moments in these canvases so funny. An integral facet of the artist’s practice, titles – like Lord of the Flies…with Botox and Geriatric Chihuahua Chair Challenge (after Kline) – go far in elucidating the artist’s singular comic sensibility. And as the latter title suggests, absurdist humor might catalyze this work as much as artists such as Franz Kline, explicitly namechecked here, or even Jean Fautrier, whose fromage-like textures might be lampooned by It’s Still Good, Just Cut the Mold Off. Looking at these works, one wonders if comedy and expressionist painting aren’t such strange bedfellows, after all. Or, to put it in other terms, maybe the stand-up comedian isn’t so different from the contemporary painter: taking material to the stage and then acting situationally, improvisationally, both expanding and transforming a longstanding tradition through their work, all while giving us something in return.

Also often like the stand-up comedian, Rudd brings a bevy of personal experience to bear on her medium – each canvas is like a dilemma or conflict grappled with in real-time, and in some way made more collectively resonant. Throughout the exhibition, the artist investigates contradictory conditions of contemporary subjectivity: the craving for authentic communication within a hyper-mediated reality; the oscillation between wily self-exposure and intellectualized concealment; the collapse of solemnity into something lighter. Her works are animated by an urgency to communicate, to work-through, and to point toward what she calls the “intermediate impossible” – spaces where seemingly incompatible forces coexist or collide. In these contact zones, where thought becomes image and gesture turns to joke, Rudd’s paintings do not seek to resolve ambiguities; but somehow in conjuring them, again and again, we begin to attain a pleasing sense of clarity. This is the artist’s impulse at work: to propose ideas with a wink, to test meaning without insisting on it, and to render visible the joys and discomforts of thinking through form.

What Do They See When They’re Looking At Me? 

I used to see faces in Carrie’s paintings; I couldn’t help it. I’m thinking of one in particular because with this one, as a result of all the counting and re-counting of profiles, the obsessive attempts to trick myself into finding more and more faces, eventually I had to avert my eyes as I passed it on my living room wall; it was haunting me by taking up way too much mental space and time. Meanwhile, this compulsion of mine drove Carrie crazy: “There are no faces,” she’d say, and I’d rush over and trace the outlines of 10, 11, 12 or more profiles – “Oh look! There’s another one” – like a maniacal teacher at the blackboard. 

Look around at one of Carrie’s shows and invariably you’ll notice someone standing two to three inches from a painting, staring. And staring. Usually at one particular little spot. And for surprisingly long periods of time. Are they looking at something, I’ve wondered, or for something? Are they sovereign knowers, as Walker Percy might say, ostentatiously showing the rest of us that as experts they see something we don’t? Or are they the ones who are likely to blurt out that they don’t understand abstract art: “What does this mean? Does this mean something?” they ask out loud of no one in particular, clearly frustrated. They want to be on the inside and in the know. They want to be able to crack the code. 

At Carrie’s very first solo show at Polina Berlin Gallery in 2022, I suddenly realized, not without a smidge of embarrassment (because I’m a veteran English teacher; I know how to analyze stuff, thank you very much!) that my zeal for finding faces basically put me in the same category with the starers and the blurters. To varying degrees, we’re all assuming – no, demanding, actually, that the painting should give us something. This assumption is based on the presumption that art contains a secret, a treasure to be hunted down, dug up and preserved forever as a sort of trophy. The art rewards you with its secret. This is how my young students inevitably approached literature. They believed that the story, the novel – whatever text lay before them waiting to be analyzed, contained a “hidden meaning,” they used to say. It would take a solid year to disabuse many of them of this grave misconception. Artists do not plant hidden meanings in their work for us to find like Annie Dillard’s shiny copper penny in her essay “Seeing” (she’d hide it in the woods for people to find and thus “see” differently because of the surprise of finding it in an unexpected context). 

Instead, I tried to convince them that when we analyze something, we readers, viewers and interpreters look carefully at a thing to discover patterns, connections, specific details and binaries, seeking possible meaningfulness – not The Meaning. And their response to their English teacher was to accuse me (all of us in this profession) of apophenia, a word I wish I’d known when I was still teaching. It means the tendency to perceive connections and patterns in random or unrelated things. “But everything, every word in this poem is on purpose, guys,” I’d repeat over and over again. “An artist makes art to express some feeling or observation or question. Everything is on purpose and we’re here to consider how it’s made and why it’s made that way!” 

I’m an academic! I’m hard wired to be highly analytical, so it’s no surprise that I’m apophenic, a pareidoliac (fancy schmancy for seeing faces) at heart. But at that 2022 solo show at Polina Berlin Gallery, I had a delightful epiphany about Carrie’s paintings. I was drawn to one of the small ones: lush dark green at the center, a jungle, a feral swamp – danger lurking. But it’s titled Wearing Her Panties Like a Diaper. What? She’d implied that this one was about me; don’t ask. Did the poor child once see me with some ill-fitting old lady underwear on? I didn’t ask and don’t need to know. 

Carrie’s paintings spring from her mind like wild harpies winging their way through her experiences, memories and imagination, anxious to get to the canvas where they can live and breathe. Where they’re given new life. And that is the point. I stood close and peered into the center of the green. What’s in there, I wondered. And then I saw my own eyes looking back at me. But not my eyes, exactly: my eyes as they’d been drawn by Stephen Brodner, a prominent caricaturist and cartoonist (among other graphic arts) well known for his edgy editorial illustrations in high end publications like The New Yorker. He’d done a caricature of me back in 1979 at a famous poker party in Greenwich Village. 

It’s hanging on my bedroom wall, and somehow Carrie worked those eyes into the painting but made them barely visible, yet distinctly mischievous, a touch of evil in that dark tangled jungle. And then I saw my lips, red lipstick in the shape of a 3 (or is it a B for Beth?) lying on its side. That me is looking at this me, I remember thinking. But wait – it’s the “I” that sees and the “me” that is seen. Not to mention that in this case, in that moment of communion for me personally, it was the “eye” / I (my own eyes) that were seeing me. Where am I, I remember thinking. Scary but cool. Carrie is keenly aware of how we’re born into language and bound by the politics of subject / object relationships. 

And this is an important point about her work. I think of this revelatory moment wherein I saw myself being seen as a literal model of what I believe she’s doing in her paintings. It’s as if the paintings are speaking to us, inviting us into a conversation. What are you looking for? Do you see me looking at you? They are asking us the questions, not the other way around, and this living conversation keeps her paintings always new, animated and surprising. The conversation doesn’t stop the way it would if in our looking we were merely searching for The Meaning so we can box it up, store it away and call it a day: I can relax now because I cracked the code. But they’re not there to give us something. Instead they’re there to ask us something. 

So there is a world of difference between looking at and being seen. Just imagine the exhilarating dynamic of both happening at once as I experienced with this painting. In a college English class, I’d say it exemplifies Lacan’s notion of the Real. It’s as if she’s playing with the notion of signification itself, a dizzying blurring of subject and object. And isn’t it precisely the collapse of binaries that is most interesting about art? Smart art? Think of it as a kind of hall of mirrors where the delight is in losing the boundaries of where we begin and end. Or, once again, think of it in Lacanian terms which suggest that identity is always relational – that I am I because you see me, to grossly oversimplify. Better yet, think of Carrie’s paintings as I / Thou relationships – love you, Martin Buber – instead of the murderous assault on the object which results from I/It relationships. I am the seer and you are the dead thing I see: a sort of reification or commodification to put it in Marxist terms. Emily Dickinson has a great line about this idea in #1071: “Perception of an object costs/Precise the Object’s loss.” I think Carrie thinks about that. It’s a now you see it now you don’t sort of thing.

Sorry, Carrie: getting all academic when what I want to say is deeply personal. But I think about this stuff. It’s fun and playful. Your paintings are fun and playful too, but I recognize in them some very profound ideas about perception. You’re messing with us and it feels good! How’s that for my nutshell summary? 

In her next show at Polina Berlin Gallery opening October 14th called The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, there’s a painting she calls What Does She See When She’s Staring at Me? “about” (they’re never really “about”) visiting my mother with dementia in the hospital. She stared intensely at Carrie and we both had the thought that maybe my mom thought Carrie was young me. And although I’m still not sure about the diaper thing – and don’t really want to go there because I just had a big birthday with a zero in it and diapers are triggering – I do want to continue my conversation with that painting. What does she see when she’s looking at me? I’m a little uncomfortable and a lot thrilled. I highly recommend you ask this question as you begin your conversation with my daughter’s dazzling paintings. 

– Beth Rudd

Beth Rudd has taught English at Hastings High School and Queens College. She has worked as a freelance writer and editor for publications ranging from Savvy to Playboy Magazine. Rudd studied as a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, completing with an ABD.

Carrie 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).

Born

• Hastings-on-Hudson, NY, 1994. Lives and works in New York, NY

Education

• 2021 | MFA, Hunter College, New York, NY

• 2016 | BA, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY

• 2015 | Affiliate Program in Painting, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, London, UK

One-Person Exhibitions 

• 2025 The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (10/14-11/15)
  An indispensable thing (with Lola Strong-Brett), NARANJO 141, Mexico City, MX (1/16-2/23)

• 2024 The Narcissism of Small Differences, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (4/3-5/4)

• 2023 Squirm, 12.26, Dallas, TX (12/16-1/20)
  Vitals II, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (3/7-4/8)

• 2022 Vitals, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (6/9-7/29)

• 2021 Tinieblas, Hunter MFA, New York, NY (11/14-11/23)

Selected Group Exhibitions

• 2025 With Color (with Marlon Kroll and Stanton Macdonald-Wright), 12.26, Dallas, TX (5/10-6/14)

• 2024 Misshape, Chapter NY, New York, NY (3/1-3/30)
  Emotional Intelligence II, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (2/22-3/27)

• 2023 Soft Focus: Jessica Cannon, Parmen Daushvili, Tamo Jugeli, Carrie Rudd (curated by Polina Berlin),superzoom, Paris, France (6/29-7/31)
  Threshold (curated by Lindsay Jarvis & Frenel Morris), 91 Allen Street, New York, NY (2/4-2/19)

• 2022 Emotional Intelligence, Polina Berlin Gallery, New York, NY (2/22-4/23)

• 2021 We Were Already Gone, Hauser & Wirth, New York, NY (5/14-6/5)
  High Noon, Conduit Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (5/20-6/18)

• 2020 Common Expression, Hesse Flatow, New York, NY (12/3-1/9/21)

• 2019 Knock on Wood, Hunter College, 205 Hudson Street, New York, NY (3/14-3/18)

• 2016 Down to the Wire, Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY (5/5-5/21)

Awards, Fellowships and Residencies

• 2024 Residency, NARANJO 141, Mexico City, MX

• 2023 Residency, superzoom, Ardèche, FR

• 2017 Residency, Spread Art, Artist in Residence, Detroit, MI

• 2016 Award, The J. Barney Moore Prize in Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY

• 2014 Award, Smallen Award for Creativity, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY