Now on view:
George Woodman: A Democracy of Parts, Paintings 1966-1978 at DC Moore Gallery
535 W 22nd St, 2nd floor, New York
through May 3rd

By 1977, George Woodman’s tessellation paintings became non-periodic or aperiodic, consisting of a set of shapes which tiled the canvas but did not necessarily repeat. In her catalogue essay, Rebecca Lowery elaborates on one example: “Woodman’s tessellating forms in Grey Portal are intriguingly eccentric, their mix of straight and irregularly undulating facets resembling something like a map. The complexity of the arrangement is astounding: more than 50 different tile shapes make up its mysteriously undulating surface, some of which are only seen once or twice.

”In order to develop patterns from non-identical shapes and non-identical arrangements of repeating shapes, Woodman first made templates. He hand-drew groups of individual elements and re-combined them in a variety of ways before translating them onto a canvas. In the fall of 1978, to further experiment with this approach, he had 400 tiles of four different drawn elements and their mirror images printed onto paper in black, white and magenta. Rather than restricting his work within the two-dimensional confines of a painting, these paper tiles allowed him to move pattern into three-dimensional space through a series of site-responsive installations. “I was much taken with the idea of showing work created for and in the actual exhibition space from easily transported and inexpensive materials,” he wrote. He eventually made more than a dozen such installations in museums and galleries across the country.

The first of Woodman’s paper tile installations in 1979 was made from the very same tiles he had first produced for study, attached to free-standing panels at Claremore College in Oklahoma. In subsequent installations, the paper tiles were stapled directly onto the wall, at times forming immersive environments. Woodman’s tiles also shifted from pre-printed to hand-made, often realized in collaboration with students and based on Woodman’s instructions for integrating a color system. In the very last of these installations in 1984, Woodman worked with students to construct a sprawling tiling for the floor of the Bevier Gallery at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.