CORAL WOODBURY – Revised Edition
Solo exhibition at HackelBury Fine Art, London 7 March – 4 May 2024
HackelBury Fine Art, London, presents Coral Woodbury’s second solo exhibition, Revised Edition, featuring new work from three series, all inspired by the form and substance of the book. Woodbury uses recurring motifs such as ashes, palimpsests, and remnants of material culture to evoke themes of absence and memory, and bridge human connection across time.
In her series, Revised Edition, Woodbury enacts a feminist intervention in the art history canon. On pages torn from the seminal Janson’s History of Art – which entirely omitted artist women from its first 29 printings – she, with sumi ink, paints women back into the history which excluded them. Her work renders the invisible visible.
“When complete, Revised Edition will encompass 617 paintings and will stand as testimony against the erasure of others which reaches deeply into our culture.”
Oil paintings from the Broken Spine series continue this same exploration of the vagaries of memory, time, and history. Translucent layers of paint and obscured writing lend an ephemeral quality which suggests the fading, forgetting, and fragmenting of the past. From parchment manuscripts, to authors’ galley proofs, to the current US book banning epidemic — the traces and erasures of thought become part of the process of painting.
“These paintings originated when I was recovering from a fractured spine. Themes of brokenness and repair entered my work, and I began exploring the metaphorical connections between book and body.”
The series In Place is Woodbury’s personal travelogue, noted in colour rather than writing. Finding a timeworn book specific to the location has become an orienting ritual upon arrival. The pages, swatched in various hues of gouache, record fleeting experiences in the language of color.
About Coral Woodbury
Boston-based artist Coral Woodbury (b.1971) exhibits nationally and internationally and in 2020 was a finalist for the international Mother Art Prize, culminating in the Procreate Project exhibition at Cromwell Place in London. In 2018 she took part in the International Travelling Art exhibition at Taragaon Museum, Kathmandu, Nepal; #00Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; and VANITAS#IMPERMANENCE, Travelling Exhibition in Genova and Trieste, Italy. Woodbury was recently included in the group exhibition ‘Medium & Memory’ curated by Griselda Pollock at HackelBury Fine Art and its accompanying catalogue.
Her work is held in public and private collections, including The Katrin Bellinger Collection, The Cross Steele Family Collection and The Women’s Art Collection, University of Cambridge.
About HackelBury Fine Art
HackelBury Fine Art was founded twenty-five years ago by Marcus Bury and Sascha Hackel. The gallery is committed to championing artists working with the visual arts who push the boundaries of their medium to create meaningful and contemplative work.
The London based gallery initially showcased classic photography from the 20th century including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Berenice Abbott, Willy Ronis, Malick Sidibe, Sebastião Salgado and Edouard Boubat. The transition from traditional photography to more conceptual work was as intuitive as it was organic, beginning with artists such as William Klein, Pascal Kern, Doug and Mike Starn, Garry Fabian Miller, Katja Liebmann, Ian McKeever, Stephen Inggs and Bill Armstrong. In recent years the gallery has also taken on emerging artists such as Oli Kellett, Nadezda Nikolova, Alys Tomlinson and Coral Woodbury.
Each artist, whether emerging or established, creates work defined by a depth of thought and breadth and consistency of approach. The small group of artists with whom HackelBury work, represent a diversity of practice yet share an artistic integrity which the gallery is fully committed to supporting in the long-term.
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HACKELBURY FINE ART
4 LAUNCESTON PLACE, LONDON W8 5RL
T: 020 7937 8688
© 2021 HackelBury Fine Art, Ltd. Copyright for all images is held by the respective artist or estate and they may not be reproduced in any form without express permission. All rights reserved.
APPENDIX
Medium & Memory exhibition links:
Art Style | Art & Culture International Magazine 