Clare Woods RA (b.1972) is one of the most sought-after painters working in Britain today. Her highly colouristic paintings hover between abstraction and representation, expressing both a poetic romanticism and an unnerving psychic charge. Her distinctive style is informed by her background in sculpture. She uses large, bold and gestural brushstrokes of thick, fluid paint to make still life and figurative paintings that are usually based on photographs of real objects and people, but enlarged, cropped, and distorted almost to the point of illegibility. Much of her recent work is concerned with the fine line between mortality, fragility, sickness, and health, while at the same time creating a psychological space that is shared and inhabited by artist and viewer alike.
This book follows her previous monograph Strange Meetings, published by Art / Books in 2016. It includes all the artist's most important paintings of the past decade, as well as the many prints and collages that have grown out of her painting practice in recent years. Critic and art historian Charlotte Mullins writes a lively and accessible introduction to the artist's work, while psychoanalyst Darian Leader considers the psychological charge of its defamiliarising and estranging effects. Commentaries from Woods herself throughout provide the artist's own insights into the meaning of individual works.