Born in 1932 in Concord, New Hampshire, Woodman graduated from Harvard in 1954 with honors in philosophy and received his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 1956. He married fellow artist Betty Woodman in 1953 and after two years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1956 where he taught painting and philosophy of art at the University of Colorado for thirty years, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1995. He was an influential professor and artist in the Colorado scene in the 1960s and 70s, associated for many years with the Criss-Cross Art Communication movement, which later became associated with New York’s Pattern & Decoration (P&D) movement, and was a founding member of the seminal Spark Gallery.

Woodman began his career in the 1950s as an abstract gestural painter. In 1959, Woodman first visited Italy, greatly influencing his work. He was profoundly affected by Italian sculpture and architecture and painted daily that year surrounded by casts from the Parthenon in his 16th century studio. He and Betty eventually bought a farmhouse in Antella, Italy, in 1968, where he kept a studio and returned for part of every year for the rest of his life.

By the 1960s, Woodman’s abstract paintings had developed into mathematical and precise compositions balancing line, shape, and form, creating formally inventive tessellations with a complex understanding of color. Woodman continued his systematic approach to painting until the 1980s, when he turned toward classical figuration in both his painting and his reignited photography practice, which featured large format black and white photographs of nudes in classical architectural and sculptural settings.

Woodman’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and Mexico since the 1970s, including Patterning and Decoration, Museum of the American Foundation for the Arts, Miami, Florida in 1977; 19 Americans, Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1981; More than One Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1992; Pitti Rivisitato: Fotographie di George Woodman, Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy, 1997; Imagenes de Tiempo, Sensibilidad y Sombra, Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, 1999; Photographs of George Woodman, Amethyst Gallery, Chennai, India, 2001; Camera Obscura Photographs, Grand Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, 2004; Cut to Swipe, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, New York; Pattern, Decoration, and Crime, MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland (traveled to Le Consortium, Dijon, France), 2019; Les Chemins du Sud, Musée regional d’art contemporain, Serignan, France, 2019; and Betty Woodman and George Woodman, Charleston, East Sussex, England, 2023. A retrospective of forty years of Woodman’s painting was presented at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in 2006.

Woodman’s works are also represented in public collections internationally, including the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. He also completed major public commissions in Detroit, Michigan; Denver, Colorado; and Buffalo, New York.