LONDON.- Victoria Miro announced representation of Clare Woods. New paintings by the artist will feature in our presentation at The Armory Show, New York, this September. Woods’s first exhibition with the gallery will take place in London in February 2027.
Clare Woods chronicles the places, people and things of our world with an unerring eye for the mutable and mysterious. Whether intimate or monumental, her work is at once a site of physical interaction and a cerebral arena in which complexities of representation and painterly truth are scrutinised and challenged.
Woods' singular approach, in which oil paint is applied in characteristically flowing and expressive brushstrokes to aluminium panels laid flat before she views them on a wall, might be thought of as a procedural nod to the Abstract Expressionists’ liberating method of laying unstretched canvases on the ground. Yet, the physicality of the Woods’ practice, pushing paint through paint and mixing colours directly on the aluminium panel, infuses her works’ surfaces with a distinct presence that adds layers of interpretation to her subject matter. As Charlotte Mullins writes, ‘There is a latent tension in her works, in the fault line between the emotive threat of decay and her energetic brushstrokes.’
That fault line often threads through inseparable dualities of beauty and fragility inherent in the art historical genres Woods gravitates towards – the wilting of flowers in her still life paintings, the looming of clouds in her landscapes – or underscores interventions dreamlike and foreboding, chromatic or atmospheric, in the often quotidian scenes she depicts. While earlier works, completed in muted tones, err towards the disorienting or haunting, more recently, saturated, sometimes molten hues serve to intensify a sense of flux and a sliding psychological register. In essence, Woods’ subject matter is this transience. Exploring physical form through fluid mark-making, she alerts us to shifts of mood and meaning and, ultimately, to the fleetingness of life.
Woods’ subjects are drawn from an ever-growing trove of photographs, many taken by the artist, though sometimes put to use only years later when their meaning or feeling is ready to reveal itself in paint. A sense of control – of photographic enlargement, crop and edit, or of images considered over time – finds an unruly companion in her process of painting wet-into-wet, an instinctive method dictated in part by paint itself. As the artist says, ‘The image is the catalyst, but ultimately it is just the starting point.’
