New York City, NY — The Louis K. Meisel Gallery is pleased to announce Urban Landscapes, an exhibition of recent works by second-generation Photorealist Randy Dudley.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, Dudley studied art under the mid-western landscape painter Harold Gregor at Illinois State University, and his early paintings were primarily small narrative landscapes. A move to Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1978 introduced him to the gritty cityscapes that soon became his artistic focus. In such works as Gowanus Canal from 2nd Street and Centre Street, Brooklyn, bridge and subway overpasses dominate with their strong structural presence.  Depicted from below, they arch across these small compositions. It is the pedestrian view experienced and captured during Dudley’s neighborhood walks, but only rarely is a figure glimpsed in the distance. As in so many Photorealist works, humanity is represented by the built environment—by the looming steel buttresses, by the lines of parked cars and, in Centre Street, Brooklyn, by an abandoned shopping cart.

Among the Photorealists, Dudley is noted as a particularly strong draughtsman. His beautifully articulated, monochromatic graphite drawings evoke a calm, well-ordered world of light and shadow seemingly at odds with the gritty subject matter: an artistic tension that infuses these scenes with a somber, delicate beauty.

In Hamilton and Bush, Dudley employs a wider, more open composition. Here, the monumental struts of the overpass loom against a clear blue sky. The barren grandeur of the vista is brightened by the clear rich color; the green patina of the iron artfully set off by splashes of red in the signs and the yellow of just glimpsed McDonald’s arches. The frozen river in Algoma on the Ahnapee River has its own grandeur as it flows toward the long low horizon past the rotting railings of the sagging wharf in the foreground. The old farm and factory buildings that line the river’s banks speak to Rust-Belt hard times for this small mid-western town that bravely hangs on, its church steeple rising in the distance. In this meticulously realized panorama Dudley has given us a twenty-first century American landscape that moves us with its melancholy beauty.

Dudley’s work is represented in many public collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Randy Dudley: Urban Landscapes is on display at 141 Prince Street, New York, NY from 12 November 2022 to 23 December 2022. For more information, please contact the Louis K. Meisel Gallery at gallery@meisels.com.