For its third year participating in Dallas Art Fair, Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a solo booth of seven new works by British painter, Clare Woods, a first for the artist at the fair. Woods will also launch a large scale, site-specific, watercolour mural, created as a permanent display for River Bend, a re-development project in the creative community housed in the Design District of Dallas, Texas, USA.
Over the course of a career spanning more than twenty years Woods has developed a unique painterly language that is concerned by the sculpting of an image in two dimensions. Originally trained as a sculptor, Woods established her reputation with large-scale landscape paintings rendered in enamel on aluminium. The artist derives inspiration from found photographic sources such as newspaper clippings, magazines, and other diverse sources of visual ephemera that depict unsettling, disturbing and often transgressive imagery. An astute chronicler of personal and historical trauma, she attempts in her painting to process the effects of grief, disappointment and cruelty even as it cryptically depicts those subjects.
Woods immersive paintings of a diverse scale have moved into figurative works that point to a more emotive mode of representation and are rendered in rich hues of oil paint that depict lived experience and cultural memory. Acute psychological states are portrayed through the nuances of Woods’s gestural approach to painting, which defamiliarizes the familiar and expresses strangeness through expansive, vigorous brushwork, compositional distortion and abstract colour. Woods’ interpretations shift between figuration and abstraction imbuing this central tension with volume, weight and interior mystery, continuously thinking of space and the object.
Commissioned by the Dallas Art Fair in collaboration with Simon Lee Gallery, the artist will realise watercolour works in the form of eleven 13-feet by 7-feet tile murals which will be on permanent display on the River Bend building’s façade. Taking inspiration from the rich surrounding landscape, and the Trinity River, Wood’s plays with the concept of scale which has been central to the artists thought process.
There will be an opening for Wood’s site-specific commission at River Bend, on Wednesday 10 April and alongside the opening, there will be copies of a book published by the artist that will be available for purchase. Additionally, Woods will also be participating in a panel discussion with artists, Rosson Crow and Carrie Moyer, moderated by Anna Katherine Brodbeck. For further details please see editors notes.
Image: Clare Woods, Meeting and Parting, 2019, courtesy the artist and Simon Lee Gallery
