Backstories

Fragmented frescos glimpsed in Italian churches and Roman ruins, geometry noticed in Cosmati floor mosaics, and patterns seen on tile walls in Spain, Turkey, Morocco, Mexico and Portugal provided decades-worth of ideas for both artists, realized on the floor and on the wall.

In the 1980s, George Woodman’s rigorous pattern paintings based in geometric abstraction began to incorporate more representational motifs, including figures, flowers and architectural details. This resulted in a complex layering of forms and colors into foreground and background.

‍The exhibition at Charleston explores ways that Betty Woodman’s and George Woodman’s shared life and experiences over more than six decades found expression in the works that emerged from each artists’ studio. Art history significantly influenced them both, as can be seen in many of the works on view at Charleston as well as numerous other works in the Foundation’s collection, as shown here.

This exhibition at Charleston—the home and studio of artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant—centers on Betty and George Woodman’s prolific time in Antella, Italy, where they lived and worked together for part each year for nearly 50 years. In addition to presenting a range of artworks exploring the couple’s mutual influences and their ongoing dialogue in a variety of media, the exhibition includes archival photographs documenting their home, life and work in Antella.

Representing a decades-long dialogue in ceramics and paint, “Betty Woodman and George Woodman” brings together the artists’ vibrant ceramics, vivid abstract paintings, radical assemblages, and photographs, illuminated by archival materials. Focused on the couple’s prolific time at their farmhouse in Antella, Italy—where they lived and worked for part of each year for nearly fifty years—the exhibition explores the artists’ mutual influences and their shared life immersed in art, culture, travel and experimentation, reflected in kindred palettes and patterns.

“Betty Woodman and George Woodman” is the first UK exhibition to show both artists' work together, celebrating the work of ground-breaking American ceramic artist Betty Woodman and the painter and photographer George Woodman.

Of this group of works from the 1990s, many not seen for decades, Johanna Fateman wrote in her recent review in The New Yorker: “As with everything on view in this wonderful show, the installation is so gestural and so fluid that it’s easy to forget that the ecstatic whole is composed of brittle parts.”

‍The Balustrade Relief Vases, which Betty Woodman began making in the 1990s, were a turning point in her work, in which she fully embraced the space and concerns of painting, through sculptural materials.

"The evolution of the Kimono Vases began with three-part vases, or triptychs. I thought about the movement from one piece to another; in and out of the negative and positive shapes so that it ultimately became one. The triptychs got bigger and the handles became flat, more abstract and complicated,” Betty Woodman wrote in 1991.

Betty Woodman began her career as a potter, inspired by a Bauhaus ethos to make beautiful objects for people to use in their daily lives. By 1980, when she and her husband George Woodman—a painter and photographer—purchased the New York City loft where they lived and worked for part of each year until the end of their lives, she had already begun moving away from the purely functional concerns of ceramics.

The 1990s was a career-defining period for Betty Woodman in which her work in ceramic declared itself as painting and sculpture through her radical formal innovations. This shift was affirmed by contemporary art critics, who increasingly discussed her work in relation to sculpture and painting of the day.

Betty Woodman’s touring exhibition which began at the Stedelijk in 1996 also included another major work: “House of the South” (1994-1996). Measuring more than 13 feet high by more than 20 feet wide, this ambitious frieze evolved from Woodman’s “Balustrade Relief Vase” series begun earlier in the decade, here incorporating multiple three-dimensional vases atop ceramic shelves, surrounded by flat ceramic relief elements implying architecture, plants and other vessels.