Clare Woods

Clare Woods is an artist whose paintings primarily focus on the process of shaping an image through paint, expressing the strangeness of an object.

Biography of Clare Woods

Clare Woods was born in 1972 in Southampton, UK. She studied at the Bath College of Art in Bath from 1991 to 1994, earning a BA in Fine Art. Later, from 1997 to 1999, she attended Goldsmiths College in London, where she obtained an MA in Fine Art.

In 2022, she was honored as a Royal Academician by the Royal Academy in London.

Her recent solo exhibitions include "The Drama Triangle" at Martin Asbaek Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (2015); "Victim of Geography" at Dundee Contemporary Art in Dundee, UK (2017); "Rehumanised" at Simon Lee Gallery in Hong Kong (2018); "If Not Now Then When" at Buchmann Galerie in Berlin, Germany (2020); "What Difference does it Make" at Martin Asbæk Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark (2021); and "Between These Words" at Simon Lee Gallery in Hong Kong (2022).

Clare Woods's works are in various collections worldwide, including The Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation in Athens, the Honart Museum in Tehran, The Ophiuchus Collection in Geneva, Southampton City Art Gallery in Southampton, the Arts Council Collection in London, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, among others.

Currently, she lives and works in Hereford, UK.

Clare Woods' Art Style

Trained initially as a sculptor, Clare Woods' work largely explores physical forms. Her understanding of sculptural language and fascination with spatial forms, when translated into two-dimensional images, underpin her artistic approach.

While much of her earlier work centered on the landscape, a notable shift occurred in 2011 when Woods increasingly turned her focus toward the human form. This shift in subject matter fundamentally altered her approach to art-making and simultaneously changed how she sources her imagery. In her recent paintings, she departs from her own landscape photography and instead draws inspiration from various found sources, including books, the internet, photographic records of other artists' work, and black-and-white press photographs.

A prevalent theme in Woods' recent work is the exploration of fragility, vulnerability, mortality, and disability. Clare Woods's art straddles the delicate boundary between sickness and health, cruelty and humanity, and ultimately life and death. Even when her images are not explicitly about the human body, the concept of bodies looms large. Through a tapestry of brightly colored abstractions and compositional distortions, Woods' anthropomorphic studies bring to mind heads, limbs, and torsos. It's akin to viewing the human form through a distorted lens, a process of defamiliarization and estrangement