Gardiner Museum

Betty Woodman : Places, Spaces & Things

March 3rd - June 5th, 2011

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"EXUBERANT SHOW! RECALLS ASPECTS OF MATISSE"

-THE GLOBE AND MAIL

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Betty Woodman (American, b. 1930) is among the most original and most important contemporary ceramic artists.

Since the 1970s, she has produced a significant and distinctive body of work that explores the boundaries between ceramics, painting and sculpture in exciting and innovative ways. Her work has been collected by major museums around the globe, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. In 2006, Woodman was given a full retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an honour rarely bestowed by that institution on living artists.

Betty Woodman: Places, Spaces & Things features a selection of Woodman’s painted ceramics and wall installations from the past 20 years of her career. The heart of the exhibition is a group of fifty porcelain vessels that were created by Woodman during multiple residencies at the Sevres Factory in France between 1987 and 2009. Inspired by historical examples, these porcelains feature expressively distorted forms and brightly painted surfaces that recall the work of modern masters like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. In addition to the Sevres pieces, the exhibition also includes a number of large-scale painted ceramic vessels and several of Woodman’s monumental canvas and ceramic painting installations.

Places, Spaces & Things is the first major exhibition of Woodman’s work in Canada. The exhibition will be guest-curated for the Gardiner Museum by Patterson Sims, former director of the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, working in conjunction with the artist.

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PRESS

March 25, 2011

"The view through Betty Woodman's window"

By GUY DIXON
From The Globe and Mail

Click here to read the Globe and Mail profile on Betty Woodman

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Exhibition Readings

 Click here for additional exhibition reading material

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