Modern Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Clare Woods. This is the British artist’s fourth solo show with Modern Art.

Over the past decade or so, Clare Woods has unabatedly concerned herself with landscape painting. Woods haunts the picturesque country expressed throughout the history of British painting, leaving us the image of a land full of dark forgotten corners and overgrown hollows. Interpreting the conventions and traditions of the landscape genre, Woods takes as her subjects the experience of landscape and the experience of objects that might lie within it.

Working from photographic images, Clare Woods’ method is to extract an underlying visual structure by means of line drawing from her source: an essential process of translation for the artist through which she can abstract information that can be used as the foundation upon which to construct a painting. Her experience of landscape or of a sculptural object is rendered down to an image, a line, and then remade in colour, almost entirely subordinated to the process and material through which form gradually overtakes content. The construction of her paintings contrasts with the rigidity of her subjects: flows of liquid oil paint are worked over aluminium surfaces in fluid layers and jagged webs, suppressing all but vestiges of the naturalistic image as painterly priorities prevail.

Clare Woods was born in Southampton in 1972 and lives and works in London and Herefordshire. She completed an MA in Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College, London in 1999, after a BA in Fine Art at Bath College of Art, Bath, in 1994. Earlier this year Woods completed a permanent outdoor mural commission for public sites within the London Olympic Park. Woods’ paintings have been the subject of solo exhibitions The Dark Matter, Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton (2012); The Unquiet Head, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield (2011); and Deaf Man’s House, The Chisenhale Gallery, London (2006).

For further information please contact Ryan Moore at Modern Art: ryan@modernart.net