Buchmann Galerie is pleased to announce the sixth solo exhibition with British painter Clare Woods (GB, *1972) at the gallery.
The work of Clare Woods has its origins in landscape painting. In several phases over the past few years, she has unfolded a multi-layered oeuvre, which today deals in different series with portraits, still lifes or interiors and also repeatedly with landscape depictions.
These are elements of the classical genre, which, before the storm of modernism, served to ensure continuity of style and self-assurance of the public‘s taste. Clare Woods uses the genre to deliver a different, ambiguous experience: her subjects entice with familiarity but subvert it aesthetically through the idiosyncratic method of pictorial conception and controlled gestural painting. Seemingly familiar things, such as a bouquet of flowers in The Sleep Walker or a mountain massif as in Twice Breathed Air and a picture of clouds as in Vagus Nerve, gain a presence in Clare Woods‘ work that is shaped more by a psychological state and emotional states than by a securing of taste.
Clare Woods develops her image motifs in elaborate preliminary studies based on her own photographs and image sources from books, the internet or press photos. These media originals go through several processing steps. The artist describes how she „visually empties“ the motifs from her sources before they can finally be transformed into paintings.
Clare Woods paints her pictures with oil paint on aluminium, which withstands her painterly grip better than the commonly used canvas stretched on stretcher frames. In addition Woods works flat, physically interacting with the surface of the painting mixing the colours wet on wet in one extended session of painting.
Woods‘ unmistakable painting style is characterised by lightness, speed and a rhythm with which she forms her gestural but always controlled brushstrokes into clusters that accumulate pictorial meaning in the overall composition. Clare Woods is able to give the negative space surrounding an object the same painterly meaning as the object itself.
The work by Clare Woods has been shown in solo exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield, Southampton City Art Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery in London, Serlachius Museum in Mänttä Finnland, amongst others.
Her work can be found in the public collections of the Arts Council Collection, London, British Council, London, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Colección VAC (Valencia Arte Contemporáneo), Valencia, Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation, Athens, Honart Museum, Tehran, The Nation Collection of Wales, Cardiff, The Ophiuchus Collection, Geneva, Southampton City Art Gallery and the University of Warwick.
For further information on the artist and images of the works, please feel free to contact the gallery at any time.
