Frieze New York
2018
May 3—6, 2018
For Your Infotainment / Hudson and Feature Inc., the first-ever themed section at Frieze New York,pays tribute to a legendary gallerist and the artists he championed. Known only by his first name, Hudson (1950–2014) opened Feature Inc. in Chicago on April Fools’ Day in 1984; the gallery moved to New York four years later, where Hudson held early solo exhibitions by artists including Lisa Beck, Tom of Finland, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Charles Ray, and Raymond Pettibon. As part of this Frieze section, David Zwirner will present a solo booth of over one hundred early works by Pettibon made during the years of his close working relationship with Hudson in the 1980s and 1990s.
Curated by Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator at White Columns art space in New York, For Your Infotainment takes its name from the slogan on Feature Inc.’s compliments slip that reflects the unique style of a gallerist renowned for his steadfast attitude and renegade approach. Over his thirty-year career, Hudson earned a reputation for following his instincts and ignoring trends, exhibiting widely different kinds of work. As Higgs stated, "The artists who exhibited at Feature Inc. were, and remain, to use Lynne Cooke’s poignant term, ‘outliers’: artists who are hard to pigeon-hole and whose work actively resists easy categorization." A case in point is "the enigmatic, fantastically erudite artist Raymond Pettibon," as Peter Schjeldahl called him in a recent New Yorker review, whose work embraces a wide spectrum of American high and low culture, from the deviations of marginal youth to art history, literature, sports, religion, politics, and sexuality. Shown in thirteen exhibitions at Feature Inc. over the years, Pettibon’s work has come to occupy its own genre of potent and dynamic artistic commentary.
Together with solo presentations by seven other artists closely associated with Feature Inc. and a booth representing the recently launched non-profit Feature Hudson Foundation (FHF), For Your Infotainment honors a man remembered in The New York Times as "one of the most prescient, independent-minded and admired gallerists of his generation."