Nicholas Woods

American Nude

Gallery Press release

    Pelaires is delighted to present American Nude, an exhibition of paintings in urethane on canvas by American artist Nicholas Woods. This show marks a dramatic return to large-scale painting on canvas by the artist whose work over the past several years has been primarily characterised by pastel drawings on paper and site-specific wall drawings using pure powder pigments.

With this new work, Woods has launched into a free-wheeling, emotive exploration of the expressive possibilities of color and paint. The artist eschews any notions of a “signature style” employing a highly fluid and experimental working method. This allows the spontaneous nature of the paint itself to dictate the direction each painting takes in an ever-changing process that evolves as each painting progresses. The liquid nature of urethane is such that the painting must be painted from above, with the canvas lying horizontally. Woods has been strongly influenced by the ink drawings of author Victor Hugo in his approach to these paintings. 

The title of the exhibition is a nominal reference to Great American Nude, the work by Tom Wesselman, which was a play on the literary concept of the "Great American Novel" — a metaphor for socio-cultural identity. Woods has used this as a conceit from which to explore an autobiographical vision of the world as he sees it. Decoding issues of identity, sexuality, and nature is a continuous obsession in Woods' work. In American Nude,  Woods — acting as the unreliable narrator, employs a larger scale and looser handling of paint to explore these issues.

Woods who has lifelong ties to Spain and particularly Mallorca and has been living and working here for the past 8 years.