Audra Skuodas: Seeking the Sublime
February 28 – April 18, 2026
Opening reception Saturday, February 28 from 5 – 8 pm.
At 5:15 pm during the opening reception, Dr. Jeffrey Katzin, Senior Curator at the Akron Art Museum, will give opening remarks.
Audra Skuodas (1940–2019) followed a singular path in her long artistic career, evidenced in paintings, drawings, collages, handsewn sculptures, and artists’ books produced throughout several periods from the 1970s to the late 2010s. Abattoir’s second solo exhibition devoted to Skuodas highlights three important paintings, framed by a series of large-scale works on paper—never before exhibited—and a selection of key drawings. The exhibition explores aspects of the artist’s working methods during the crucial final decade of her artistic output.
An excerpt from an essay on the artist, written by a close friend, includes Skuodas’ own statement on her methodology of that time:
In the final years of her career, Skuodas’s long progression toward increasingly stylized and archetypical imagery reached total abstraction with works that are geometrically structured, yet soft and emotive through the artist’s varied compositions and sublime palette of pale pinks, blues, greens, and yellows. This form of abstraction was especially well suited for Skuodas’s aim “to reveal moments when invisible phenomena make themselves visible” and her method in which “Each painting, drawing, or book builds on my previous work.”
An avid reader of world history, philosophy, and spiritual practices, Skuodas worked in intense periods of concentrated activity, allowing her subconscious to guide the creation of abstract compositions as she reworked patterns and symbols from paper to canvas. She sought access to what she described as the “archetypal intellect” through a deeply intuitive approach to artmaking. Pared down to essential elements, the works in Seeking the Sublime are among the most reductive in her oeuvre. Austere yet luminous, they exude a reverence for abstraction’s ability to reveal the invisible forces that maintain cosmic order.
Seeking the Sublime is presented ahead of Skuodas’ first major museum retrospective to take place in 2027 at the Akron Art Museum. The exhibition will trace the development of her open-ended practice, from early figurative and psychologically charged imagery to the geometric abstractions of her final years, positioning her more fully within the histories of postwar American abstraction and the Lithuanian diaspora.
Dr. Jeffrey Katzin, Senior Curator at the Akron Art Museum and curator of the forthcoming retrospective, will give opening remarks at 5:15 pm.
Skuodas’ work is held in the collections of the Akron Art Museum, the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others. Regional exhibitions during her lifetime were numerous; other presentations included with Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago and Moti Hassan Gallery in New York. In 2010, she received the Cleveland Arts Prize Lifetime Achievement Award, recognizing five decades of sustained and rigorous artistic production.
