Rotwand is delighted to present a solo exhibition with new works by Clare Goodwin (*1973 Birmingham).

Clare Goodwin’s practice encompasses paintings, drawing and one-to-one bronze sculptures. Though there are frequent shifts between these different mediums, Goodwin's interests and concerns remain the same. Taking her source material from discarded garments and retro 'Ideal Home' manuals, found whilst roaming the ‘museums of the unwanted’, Goodwin presents a number of abstract and geometrical compositions - portraits of the 'Still Lived'.

Beyond these material references, they evoke (not merely retro) images but also engage one with specific social groups and personality types associated with the 1970s/80s. Goodwin calls her paintings “portraits”, giving them names such as “Kim”, “Tony”, “Kevin“, “Doug and Wendy”. Goodwin favours the “married couple” or the “divorced couple” as typical life forms, because to her they best represent, and easily fit into the world she grew up in. The alleged coldness of the geometric abstraction is emotionally charged with the precise colour harmonies, dissonances and consciously replicated stereotypical ornamental details, such as the ubiquitous grey-blue diagonal stripes in men’s ties-, i.e., elements associated with the aesthetic sensibilities of an era. Colour fields of orange, violet and brown often dominate the canvas, rhythmized by black, grey and white rectangular motifs and lines.

During the past year Goodwin has been working on a new body of drawings entitled “Moments of Pleasure Don’t Last Forever”. The fleeting moments of pleasure she hopes to capture have been borrowed from a wealth of sources: the ecstatic faces of those illustrated in the best-selling classic “The Joy of Sex”, for example, and a Magritte painting discovered in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Goodwin's recent homage to Magritte and her ongoing series of kitchen paintings (which are made and hung with the optimum 90 cm work-top height in mind) describe her interest in the true-to-scale relationship between the object and its depiction in her work. This is likewise the case in Goodwin's bronze sculpture of a cauliflower and appetising titbits, which—if they weren’t made of bronze—would hardly outlast the exhibition opening.