George Woodman

This summer, take in the fluid beauty of water as seen through the eyes of Betty Woodman, George Woodman, and Francesca Woodman.

George Woodman’s still life photography bears unmistakable traces of his decades-long career as a painter: His compositions—re-photographed prints and negatives, fruits and drapery, sculptures and paintings collapsed into a single pictorial space—are at once witty and rich in art historical allusion.

Happy anniversary to Betty and George Woodman, who married on this day in 1953.

Watch the exhibition video to listen to Rebecca Lowery, Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University, discusses George Woodman's evolving use of tessellations and color.

In 1987, three years after his first ceramic tile public commission for Buffalo Metro Rail, New York, George Woodman realized an installation for the Detroit People Mover’s Renaissance Center station. A firm believer in public art, he sought to create a work that does more than simply impress at first glance but rather brings life to being in the station for commuters using the system daily.

This week is your last chance to see George Woodman: A Democracy of Parts, Paintings 1966-1978, an exhibition tracing the development of Woodman’s singular approach to pattern and color over a series of paintings rarely shown in New York in more than 40 years.

By 1977, George Woodman’s tessellation paintings became non-periodic or aperiodic, consisting of a set of shapes which tiled the canvas but did not necessarily repeat.

By the mid-70s, George Woodman’s singular approach to pattern painting—as harmony between color and form—was well established and recognized among artists and critics alike. Woodman’s canvases were part of the larger zeitgeist around pattern in the art of this period.

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.

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.

Tessellations are a type of pattern in which one or more geometric shapes are repeated—and often rotated and reflected—to seamlessly cover a surface. In George Woodman’s case, that surface was a canvas.

In her essay for the exhibition’s catalogue—“The Mind as it Measures: George Woodman’s Patterns”—curator Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery discusses Woodman’s approach to pattern and color in the context of his contemporaries.