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

George Woodman’s tessellated pattern paintings built upon observations made in the three-dimensional realm of architecture, specifically in the tiled surfaces that covered walls and floors as they emerged from and receded into space. By understanding the geometric particulars in three-dimensions, Woodman could construct an illusion of space within a two-dimensional pattern painting. As Rebecca Lowery explains in her catalogue essay, he seems to have figured this out through a set of sketches of the rotations and reflections of numbered dice. “In a sense,” she writes of these sketches,” Woodman is working out what it looks like for flat shapes to tumble through dimensional space.”

But Woodman’s exploration of geometry as a spatial discipline was not limited to the surface of a canvas; it also included a series of sculptures. “These sculptures,” Lowery continues, “which he likely made in the mid-1970s, brought his abstract forms to life, transforming patterns into dynamic spatial entities… he photographed them extensively, arranging individual works in differing configurations that revealed the variety of their faces and vertices.“

Like the [earlier] pyramidal painting [hung in his yard in 1964], these works can be seen as a bridge between Woodman’s two-dimensional paintings and his [later] architecturally inspired installations…They reveal an artist deeply engaged with the possibilities of form and space, experimenting with the ways in which patterns are able to both occupy and transform physical environments… A comparison of these polyhedral sculptures with Untitled (1975) reveals the degree to which Woodman was using pattern and color to think in three dimensions.”