Plotline

PLOTLINE 5 considers the performative aspects of Francesca Woodman’s practice. In her photographs and videos, Woodman claimed the female body as subject by using her own - staging and sequencing its movements, capturing it in motion. The bodily, temporal, and spatial concerns in Woodman’s work align her with the feminist performance art of her time. Woodman’s photographs reveal traces of her carefully constructed performative process.

From his early abstract paintings to more recent painted photographs, color was a powerful and continuous thread in George Woodman’s work. Even as his focus shifted to black and white photography, Woodman never abandoned his interest in color, instead finding ways to create unexpected dialogues between and across media.

Betty Woodman is widely known for her seven-decade, groundbreaking engagement with clay, in particular her deconstruction and re-framing of the classical vase.

Beginning his career in the 1950s as an abstract painter, by the mid 1960s George Woodman turned his focus to geometric abstractions grounded in complex patterned systems and rigorous formal structures.

Welcome to PLOTLINES, a series of features focused on ideas, themes and forms in the work of the Foundation’s three artists: Betty Woodman, Francesca Woodman and George Woodman.