Courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London. © Clare Woods

Clare Woods, "Black Vomit" (2008). Enamel and oil on aluminum, 78 3/4 x 110 in.

   November 2008 Reviews

Total Enlightenment

Paul McCarthy

Eleanor Antin

Roger Hiorns

Lorraine O'Grady

Ron Amstutz

Raha Raissnia

Alexandra Grant

Dave Cole

Multiple Modernities:
India, 1905 - 2005

Gemma Holt

Roger Hilton

Joachim Koester

The Talamoni Collection

Amelie Von Wulffen

Gary Hume Cult of Personality Landy’s Tate Exhibit Shows Tinguely’s “Destructive” Influence Realizing an American Dream ShContemporary on Solid Footing, Despite Setbacks Inside Man 10 Tomes The High Life

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Clare Woods’s painting practice has certainly traveled some distance since the painting-by-numbers evocations of foliage—camouflage as Gary Hume might render it—she was making at the start of the decade. Photographs of the natural landscape continue to provide the blueprints for these enamel-on-aluminum works. Yet her growing assurance with subject, camera, and paint has somewhat altered the view, in ways that can leave one hankering for the simplicity of works past. After witnessing the epic multipanel Rock of the Night (2006) in all its slickly constructed glory at Basel 39, one can’t help but approach this latest exhibition with hope for some evidence of struggle and with a desire to be seduced without such an acute awareness of being led through the process.

While the smaller of the 2008 paintings, such as Fantastic Zoology, conform to one’s worst fears—that Woods has become bound to her pictorial ingredients in the pursuit of a successful image—the six-panel centerpiece Monster Field holds some surprises. With earlier twisted vistas, literary and filmic conventions spring to mind before those of landscape photography or even painting: pathetic fallacy Hardy style, from Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1898) to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). Here, though, one is constantly returned to technological processes. The panels appear like rudely cropped photographic swatches of urban and bucolic detail: ribbonlike brushstrokes both decorate and delineate the action; seemingly empty areas of flat color nearby reflect back facets of some internal pictorial dimension. While this exhibition is not exactly a break from the old routine, one can feel the tug once more between glossy formal and folkloric narrative concerns in the fight for compositional supremacy. "Clare Woods" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.