11 June - 10 July 2008

Galerie Besson is delighted to announce the third and final exhibition in its Trois Grandes Dames, series shown at the gallery during 2007-8.

Anita Besson invited Woodman to take part in the series after seeing her major retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in June 2006. Woodman’s boldly decorated clay sculptures, inspired by, amongst other things, architectural details, ancient pottery and impressionist paintings are set to transform the tranquil gallery space into an explosion of colour and pattern.

Betty Woodman’s Generosity

by Barry Schwabsky

I’ll admit to having been bemused at the idea of seeing Betty Woodman as a grand dame, perhaps because in my mind it sounds like a slightly gentler way of saying prima donna, and that phrase reminds me not at all of Woodman or her work. No melodrama here, no raw nerves or neurosis, no self-regard. This art is all generosity. Woodman’s seemingly limitless powers of formal invention are rooted in a relaxed and profoundly curious relation to traditions, techniques, materials, and ideas, wherever and whenever they come from. Boundary lines between abstract and representational structures mean as little to her as do the distinctions between painting, sculpture, and craft. The sensual pleasures of color and form are here in abundance, but so are the intellectual pleasures of the semiotic games that have been so central to art since the time of the cubists.

It took Woodman a long time to develop her art to this point. Her deliberateness reflects her determination. Woodman’s immersion in the craft of pottery goes back to 1948, when she enrolled in the School for American Craftsmen at Alfred University in upstate New York. Ten years later, an encounter with the paintings of Frank Stella became, as she later recalled, a key moment in the development of her ability to “perceive ceramics in the larger context of other arts.” Still, it would be another fifteen years before she would begin systematically exploring color in her work; later in the ‘70s color would again recede in importance, only to re-emerge in the early ‘80s, by which time, in Woodman’s view, “functional concerns have really become conceptual”—or as I might prefer to put it, they have become metaphorical.

Many metaphors flow into and out of Woodman’s work but the most recurrent, indeed nearly invariable one is precisely the one that speaks most deeply of pottery’s functionality, namely the vessel. She subjects the vessel idea to innumerable metamorphoses yet it always remains recognizable. But it is always seen in relationship, never in isolation. Often it is part of a pair, sometimes of a larger group. Even if a work contains just one vessel, it will have a support without which it would not be quite complete, as in the balustrade reliefs, or it will be surrounded by one might call satellites, smaller elements that define the force-field around it, its sphere of spatial influence. In recent years, some come with colorful canvas backdrops. And often a properly three-dimensional vessel will be shadowed or masked by the planar representation of one. But if I had to choose the most fascinating aspect of Woodman’s oeuvre, I’d have to point to her use of paired vessels. They often appear to be broken fragments of a single pot, yet they never quite fit together, and of course each is a whole in itself. The constituent elements are at the same time self-contained totalities and incomplete fragments—and it is the energized space between them, where differences are mended, that allows the perceiving eye to produce the happy illusion that the pair can be resolved into a single gestalt. Here is the ultimate generosity that in Woodman’s art crowns the rest: Having given so much, she leaves space open for the viewer to tie it all together.

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