Clare Woods
dal 4/9/2006 al 15/10/2006
Segnalato da
4/9/2006
Clare Woods
Chisenhale Gallery, London
Deaf man's house. Paintings
Deaf man's house
Chisenhale Gallery presents new work by Clare Woods in her first major exhibition in a UK public gallery.
Clare Woods’ paintings have a hybrid quality comprising abstraction and figuration. They are derived from photographs she takes of rural folk traditions and supernaturally charged places. Inspired by these landscapes, Woods uses paint in formally inventive and arresting ways to create work that is seductive, unsettling and haunting.
Woods’ is fascinated by the accumulated intensity of the past in many places in Britain. Her symbolic landscapes are humanised through palpable emotions and unseen presences enmeshed within them. They cast a dark hue on any conciliatory visions of nature, hinting at our struggle to control and tame it. In her work Woods uses the innate fear and awe we have of nature and our highly developed capacity to project our desires onto it.
Her paintings are intimate, desolate and indeterminable, depicting complex and ambiguous spaces while foregrounding formal qualities that employ both control and chance. What we see in Woods’ ambitious compositions, on one level, is the pervading spirit of a landscape embodied in its natural forms and forces. But these paintings offer many possible readings of what they contain, operating like a series of Rorschach ink-blots open to interpretation and our imagination.
For her exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, Woods’ has produced three large-scale paintings, nine feet high and between twenty four and thirty six feet long, using household gloss and oil paint on aluminium. These newly commissioned paintings fill the gallery walls so that the viewer becomes physically enveloped in the reflective surfaces of the works. Just as Woods’ visual language shifts between representation and abstraction, precision and accident, she is also interested in how her paintings might take on sculptural qualities when realised at this scale, so that viewers cannot perceive the surface of the work in one take.
Clare Woods lives and works in London. She studied at Goldsmiths College, London and Bath College of Art.
Selected Solo exhibition include: La Galeria De Arta Pilar Parra, Madrid (2006), Modern Art, London (2004), Karen Lovegrove Gallery, Los Angeles (2004), Modern Art (2000), Southampton City Art Gallery (1997)
Selected Group Exhibitions include: Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Art Gallery, NY (2005), New British Painting, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton (2004), Painting as a Foreign Language, Centro Britanica Brasilliero, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002), Tailsliding (curated by Stephen Hepworth) British Council Touring Show (2001), Becks Futures, ICA London (2001)
Clare is currently collaborating with critically acclaimed practice Make Architects, founded by Ken Shuttleworth, on a major building project, Grosvenor Waterside.
She is represented by Modern Art, London.
For high res images or further information please contact Katie Boucher, tel: +44(0)20 8981 4518
or email: katie.boucher@chisenhale.org.uk
PREVIEW: TUES 5 SEPT 2006, 6:30-8:30PM
Chisenhale
64 Chisenhale Road London, E3 5QZ
Phone: +44(0)20 8981 4518
GALLERY OPENING TIMES Wednesday - Sunday, 1:00PM - 6:00PM
ADMISSION Free