OPENING
AUGUST 23rd
14:00 - 17:00
Martin Asbæk Gallery is proud to present An Unwatched Voice, a new solo exhibition by British artist Clare Woods. Taking as a starting point the artist’s own archive of found and personal photographs, the motifs of the oil paintings are defamiliarized and reduced to their simplest formal elements using instinctive, gestural and luscious brushstrokes across the aluminium surface.
The artist’s abundant flower arrangements, set against a dark background, exudes melancholia and are reminiscent of the seventeenth century memento mori, intended as a reminder of the inevitability of death, a popular artistic and symbolic trope of that time. The art historical framework of the genre is important to Woods as she herself deploys the still life format to contemplate on the fragile threshold between life and death, portraying the world through seemingly banal details steeped in anxious anticipation.
Central to the work is also Woods’ fascination with the “in-between”, and these new works seem to oscillate between the extremes of life and death, the abstract and the figurative, inside and outside - as well as the seen and unseen. A reference to the latter is also found in the title of the exhibition, in which unwatched does not refer to simply turning one’s eyes away, but rather to the act of un-doing the watching.
The unwatched thereby also refers to the paradoxical relationship between the seen and the unseen, as seeing inevitably lurks behind unseeing, creating a sense of disorientation and perceptual transience, while also raising the question: Can you really unsee and forget, or is an image simply obscured? After all, aren’t we the ones to choose what is going to be seen or unseen in our own world? These new works by Woods present what might otherwise be overlooked, forgotten or ignored, and highlight that the difference between perception and reality is not easily comprehended.
The tightly cropped composition not only obscures what might otherwise be a familiar subject, but draws attention to what is not seen, and how the image might continue beyond the parameters of the painting itself, creating a sense of unease about what is unseen or perhaps deliberately hidden.
Such as her depiction of elaborate stained-glass structures, painted in deep jewel tones, that become a metaphor for not only the thin veneer between life and death, but also between the seen and the perceived. Artists have throughout history taken an interest in this relationship, and the window, with its mediating role between inside and out, has been used to help make sense of the world and what we see – and of the threshold between the two.
Clare Woods (b. 1972, Southampton, UK) lives and works in Hereford, England. Woods was elected a Royal Academician in 2022. Originally trained as a sculptor, she received a BA in Fine Art Sculpture from Bath School of Art in 1994 and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmith’s College in 1999. Woods’ work is part of significant public collections including Buffalo AKG Art Museum, USA; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Arts Council Collection, UK; British Council Collection, UK; Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation, Greece; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, UK; Government Art Collection, UK; Hepworth Wakefield, UK; Holburne Museum, UK; Jerwood Collection, UK; Royal Collection Trust, UK; Serlachius Museums, Finland; Southampton City Art Gallery, UK; Towner Eastbourne, UK; Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, UK; National Museum of Wales, UK and University of Warwick, Mead Gallery Collection, UK.
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