Woodman’s art production of the 1960s and 70s, in particular, follows an intensely probative arc of experimentation, progression, and metamorphosis. From his initial embrace of pattern in the early 1960s, Woodman’s investigation and analysis of its possibilities compelled him to transcend the canvas to occupy three-dimensional space in multiple fashions. In this period, Woodman developed a singular body of work that is defined in not only aesthetic but also deeply structural terms, informed by mathematical principles and an internationally inflected language of ornament and design. 
––Rebecca Skafsgaard Lowery

DC Moore Gallery is pleased to present George Woodman: A Democracy of Parts, Paintings 1966-1978, its debut exhibition of George Woodman’s work in collaboration with the Woodman Family Foundation. Focusing on geometric abstractions from a significant period within the artist’s six-decade career, the exhibition traces the development of Woodman’s singular approach to pattern. This exhibition marks the first time the artist’s paintings from this period have been shown in New York since the 1980s.

In the 1960s, George Woodman began working with systematic pattern compositions, influenced by Minimalism as well as art and architecture studied during his travels to countries including Italy, Morocco, and Spain–– a visit to study tiles at the Alhambra in 1965 proved to be pivotal. By the mid-1960s, Woodman’s intellectually rigorous approach to pattern developed into tessellations––repeating, rotating, and reflecting shapes which fit together seamlessly to cover a canvas. Woodman saw these compositions as fundamentally anti-hierarchical, writing in 1978:

In contrast to looser types of pattern, tessellations suppress figure-ground relationships thus emphasizing part to part continuity in favor of part to whole relationships. In this democracy of parts "composition" is sidestepped since the elements have no hierarchical relationship to each other, or a field, beyond their common participation in some combinatorial system which is in principle boundless in extension.

Although Woodman lived in Boulder, Colorado, during these years, his mathematically derived compositions were very much in dialogue with Minimalist painters in New York, such as Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt, who he frequently referenced in his writings. Woodman is also often associated with the New York-based Pattern & Decoration movement of the 1970s and 1980s. While he shared with those artists a deep interest in Islamic tile patterns, and a multitude of other decorative traditions, his relationship to pattern was primarily rooted in mathematical explorations.