In this exhibition, painter Clare Woods deploys still life to meditate on the fragile threshold between life and death. As art critic Charlotte Mullins writes, “while still life has historically been belittled by academic institutions for depicting inanimate objects, it is this reduction in form, this stripping out of narrative, that makes the genre the perfect vehicle through which to communicate what it means to be alive, to be human, to be afraid, to be present, to face death”. 

Expanding the subject matter typically associated with still life, Woods’ compositions evolve from an archive holding thousands of found and personal photographs. Using instinctive, free-flowing brushstrokes, Woods defamiliarizes her source imagery by breaking them down into their formal elements. The artist begins with a single image, drawing a simple outline on gessoed aluminium before considering how to approach its flattened structure in paint. Working from above enables Woods to act from her shoulder rather than her wrist, adding further movement to her paintings as she pushes and smears the wet pigment across the surface.

In this new body of work, floral arrangements – traditional forms of memento mori – allude to the brevity of life. We see for example an abundant bouquet of cut flowers with luscious, undulating loops of paint. Set against a foreboding, dark background, the work exudes a sense of melancholia.

Originally trained as a sculptor, Clare Woods established her reputation with large-scale landscape paintings rendered in enamel on aluminium. Later she added her iconic flower portraits. All in all and for over 15 years now, Woods’ painting practice has been a continuous exploration of physical form through the materiality of paint.

Based on photographic source images, her immersive paintings of diverse scale have more recently moved into figurative works rendered in rich hues of oil paint. With an acute understanding of sculptural language, Woods’ interpretations shift between figuration and abstraction imbuing this central tension with volume, weight and interior mystery.

An intuitive exploration of mood, unseen presence and internal expressions are made tangible through the painting process. Metamorphic psychologic states, extremes of feeling and endurance are communicated through painted forms transcending natural appearance.

In looking outwards, expressing strangeness of objects and parts of the body heightened by the sculptural energy, luscious transformative colour and vigour of the applied paint, Woods is also turning inwards within this act of psychically charged reinterpretation. Rich meditations on the particulars of colour, intentionally ambiguous semi-organic shapes often hover between abstraction and representation with a flowing, fluid energy.

CURRENT EXHIBITION
A Kinder Time
Clare Woods
Stephen Friedman Gallery
New York

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