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

In 1965, George Woodman visited Granada, Spain to see the Alhambra, the iconic monument to Islamic architecture where geometry, ornamentation and architecture harmoniously converge in a multitude of tiled and carved surfaces. Woodman’s snapshots from the trip include details of a range of tile patterns he observed there, mixed together with pictures of his family posing under the palace’s ornate arches dating from the 13th century. These pictures of patterned fragments served as visual notes of that immersive encounter and directly inspired a number of paintings made back in his Tuscan studio. Specific forms were borrowed from Alhambra tiles, then repeated and rotated on canvases, forming the basis of the tessellation paintings he first made that year. He later noted of the experience: “A trip to the Alhambra… convinced me absolutely that an art purely of pattern could be important, complete, rich.”