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

Pattern paintings made up of repeating forms can tend towards uniformity or sameness, but not so for George Woodman. Instead, he integrated color into his pattern systems as an equal to form rather than a subordinate, constructing compositions in which color steers and complicates the viewer’s perception. In paintings from the late-60s and early-70s, dramatic shifts in hue and tone within one work suggest depth, three dimensionality and even imagery among identical elements. By the mid-70s, Woodman shifted to a softer overall palette, rendering the pattern structure almost mute, implying only an impression of form in a field of color.

“Each painting became a unique investigation into the interplay of form, color, and spatial perception,” Rebecca Lowery writes. “Across the course of the 1960s and 70s, even when Woodman’s patterns were fully periodic (meaning their component shapes repeated regularly across the work’s surface), color rendered them dynamic, evoking movement and spatial complexity; through color, he could create optical depth and a sense of undulation, concavity, or convexity. In 1978, Woodman wrote, “[Tessellated] patterns have been an invitation to give color a prominent role as a formal element. When structurally the painting is an homogeneous extension of small parts, the control and guidance of attention, the scaling of contrasts, spatial articulation and the development of specific shape identities are all powers granted to the inflection of color.”