Clare Woods until 20th October in Prague

The young English painter Clare Woods’ paintings is possible to see in Jiri Svestka Gallery, Prague. Woods’ paintings celebrate contested space. The space is at the same time intimate and desolate. These are locations devoid of any particular focus and yet they are places of possible significance – places where someone might be conceived and, as likely, someone might expire.

Woods’ interest in depicting such ambiguous space, so often hidden or overlooked, is in that it is here where wider interests and concerns can be seen to overlap. For example: popular and folk traditions, the pagan and the orthodox and what we understand as urban and as rural.The paintings are derived from photographs of undergrowth.

Taken at night using a camera and flashgun, these images capture the bright colours and reflective surfaces of pockets of scrub. Other images record vegetation obscured not by nightfall but by snowfall. These are abstract paintings and yet within the endless possible readings of the forms that they contain they are somehow psychologically charged and, are uncanny – familiar and yet somehow sinister.

Jiri Svestka Gallery, until 20th October, Tue – Fri – 12.00 – 6.00 p.m. Sat – 11.00 a.m. – 6.00 p.m. Biskupsky dvur 6, Prague.