Richard Woods: Building Landscapes

The first show David Risley made at Zwemmer Gallery, London, 17 years ago, was Logo no.13, Richard Woods’ first floor work (see below). For his show in Copenhagen, Woods is making an immersive full gallery installation. Birch trees, woodblock printed life size cover the gallery walls. Hills, clad in the artists signature wood panelled pattern, rise from the floor.

Another room is filled with a forest of comic looking totem sculptures. Twenty small, framed landscape paintings form a horizon line, running the length of a wall. In Building Landscapes, the artist takes the viewer through a series of modes of representation of landscape. Landscape as a wraparound, immersive image. As a construction to be climbed over and laid on. As a sculptural field to be navigated. As contained, painted image. These small paintings, which Woods has named, Hand Held Landscapes, recall medieval panel paintings, made to be held and used in private devotion. Moments of private contemplation, interior, civilized, away from the wildness of the forest in the next room.
Richard Woods is a graduate of The Slade School of Fine Art, London. His work crosses boundaries between art, architecture and design and is most often made up of exaggerated representations of traditional architectural and interior motifs like wooden flooring, chintz wallpapers, crazy paving or red bricks. These ‘logos of reality’ are created using traditional woodblock techniques, printed onto panels and applied as a second skin covering interior floors, walls and entire buildings. He creates a representation of the thing on the thing. The surface at once obliterates and heightens the object it covers, making it a stand in for itself. Simultaneously itself and an image of itself. Woods has said that his vibrant colour palette is inspired by his childhood memories of his parents’ home in 1970s England, where he was surrounded by “plasticky” colors and garish, narrative wallpapers. Woods continues to win prestigious commissions and exhibits around the world.

Kilde: David Risley Gallery