Portrait of Clare Woods by Josh Monaghan, House & Garden © Conde Nast, 2021
Night Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of UK-based painter Clare Woods. This partnership follows Woods’s 2022 debut After Limbo (her first solo show in Los Angeles) and her participation in Night Gallery’s group show Shrubs in January 2022. Night Gallery will include three paintings by Woods in its presentation at the Dallas Art Fair later this month.
The artist paints with oil atop aluminum, applying significant pressure onto her substrate, nearly carving into it. This technique gives her color a unique luminosity and transparency and is informed by the artist’s background in sculpture. Though her paint appears thick and voluminous, Woods is able to create the illusion of depth with a single layer of brushstrokes. Her subject matter ranges from abstracted sunsets to still lifes, her initial imagery sourced from photography. Yet Woods’s recognizable forms—dishware, a face, or the sky, for example—look new and strange thanks to the artist’s emotive mark-making. Bold, fluid brushstrokes become the true subject of Woods’s visceral work, challenging viewers to look closer at the world around them, to reconsider the boundaries between reproduction and invention, the familiar and the peculiar. Flower petals begin to evoke corporeal forms, a horizon line dissolves into pools of color.
Woods is also represented by Simon Lee Gallery (London and Hong Kong) and Martin Asbæk Gallery (Copenhagen).
Clare Woods RA (b. 1972, Southampton, UK) was elected a Royal Academician in 2022. She has presented solo shows in 2020-2021 at Simon Lee Gallery, London; Martin Asbæk Gallery, Copenhagen; Cristea Roberts Gallery, London; and Buchmann Galerie, Berlin. In March 2022, Woods mounted a solo exhibition at The Serlachius Museums, Mänttä. She has had recent institutional solo exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Mead Gallery, University of Worcester, UK; Dundee Contemporary Art, UK; Harewood House, Yorkshire; Southampton City Art Gallery, UK; Hepworth Wakefield, UK, and group exhibitions include Fernweh Space, Beijing; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. A monograph on Woods entitled Strange Meetings was published in 2016 by Art / Books, London, and her work has been featured in Frontrunner magazine, Studio International, The Art Newspaper, Frieze magazine, The Independent, and FT Magazine. Her work belongs in permanent collections of The Hepworth Wakefield, UK; National Museum, Cardiff; and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, among many others. Woods lives and works in Hereford, UK.