Audra Skuodas was born in Lithuania in 1940 and spent six years with her family in a displaced persons camp in Germany before coming to the U.S. in 1949. She earned a B.A. and M.A. at Northern Illinois University. She married the artist John Pearson in 1965 and spent most of her life in Oberlin, Ohio where she worked and exhibited locally. She received the Cleveland Arts Prize in 2010. She is represented in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, as well as several other public and private collections in the region.
A focused and prolific artist, Skuodas produced thousands of paintings, drawings and artist’s books that explore the boundaries between internal and external realities. Her work veers between the figurative and abstract, often combining recurring motifs of ovals, dots and geometric linear patterns with elongated figures and hands. She was on a lifelong quest to process her early trauma and to understand how the energies within and beyond the self are intertwined, until her death in 2019.
Abattoir’s presentation of Skuodas’ work at Expo Chicago 2023 was accompanied by a publication, Womb Wound, featuring a text written by Emily Liebert. This is the artist's first solo show at the gallery.
