Opening Thursday, April 3, 6-7:30 pm"

George Woodman: A Democracy of Parts, Paintings 1966-1978"
at DC Moore Gallery
535 W 22nd St, 2nd Floor, New York

Focusing on geometric abstractions from a significant period within the artist's six-decade career, this exhibition traces the development of George Woodman's singular approach to pattern. Though often associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement and similarly interested in decorative traditions from cultures around the globe, Woodman’s patterns were instead rooted in complex mathematical systems. His Minimalist and intellectually rigorous approach developed into tessellations—repeating, rotating and reflecting shapes or groups of shapes which fit together seamlessly to cover a canvas. “In contrast to looser types of pattern, tessellations suppress figure-ground relationships thus emphasizing part to part continuity in favor of part to whole relationships. In this democracy of parts 'composition' is sidestepped since the elements have no hierarchical relationship to each other, or a field, beyond their common participation in some combinatorial system which is in principle boundless in extension,” he wrote of this work in 1978.

Color played no less significant a role than pattern in Woodman’s paintings. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he integrated an idiosyncratic and sophisticated palette with form, often to heightened experiential and visual effects not unlike his Op Art contemporaries. In his paintings, shifts in color—both subtle and dramatic—re-defined repeating shapes, adding perceptual dimensions to abstract compositions. “Woodman consistently regards color—and attendant tonality—as the element which makes the difference between empty, rote repetition and substantive and variegated visual experience,” wrote critic and curator Peter Frank in the catalogue for 19 Artists – Emergent Americans at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1981, which included several of Woodman’s paintings from this period.The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue with an essay by Rebecca Lowery, Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University.