Clare Woods Silent Spring
3 Nov 2023—27 Jan 2024
Buchmann Galerie

Clare Woods Silent Spring

3 Nov 2023—27 Jan 2024
Buchmann Galerie
Press release

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.

 

Clare Woods

Born 1972, lives and works in Hereford, UK

Education
1997 - 99 MA, Goldsmith’s College, London
1991 - 94 BA, Bath College of Art, Bath
Grants and Awards
2022 Elected to Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK

 

Solo Exhibitions

2024
2023
2021
2020
2019
2018
2015
2013
2012
2011
2009
2008
2007
2006
2004
2002
2000
1997

Group Exhibitions

2024
2022
2020
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2011
2010
2009
2008
2007
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1996
1995
1994
Selected Collections

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj
Arts Council Collection, London
British Airways Art Collection, London
CCA Andratx, Mallorca
Colección VAC (Valencia Arte Contemporáneo), Valencia
Government Art Collection, London
Harewood House, Leeds
Honart Museum, Tehran
Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
Mead Gallery, Warwick University, Warwick
NationalCollection of Wales, Cardiff
Nuffield College Collection, Oxford
Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton
The British Council Collection, London
The Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation, Athens
The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield
The Hiscox Collection, London
The Hive, Worcester
The National Museum, Cardiff
The Ophiuchus Collection, Geneva
Tulle House Museum & Art Gallery, Carlisle
VIA University, Aarhus