Clare Goodwin
(*1973 Birmingham, UK, lives and works in Zurich since 2003)
Clare Goodwin is known for her hard-edged painting compositions, large scale wall painting installations, works on paper and collage, object-furniture and more recently her works in ceramic that stand on the edge of abstraction and figuration. All her works are occupied by geometric elements such as lines, circles and curves combined with her whisper shapes which incorporate narrative within the abstract language. Goodwin is known for a very precise technique on canvas, wall and object which once applied on ceramics enters another field of the unknown.
In Clare Goodwin’s painting practice the sense of an unorthodox relationship in play is perhaps always present in the details. For these precise, rigorously devised and carefully executed arrangements of abstract forms have been shaped by a seriously eclectic and ever-expanding inventory of source materials. Clare Goodwin always uses forenames to title her paintings. High art and home decoration appear to meet in a chromatic soap-opera on canvas that implicates a host of potential human characters in its credits. Goodwin’s survey exhibition Constructive Nostalgia at Centre PasquArt Biel in 2016 – featuring domestic dioramas of two- and three-dimensional works and architectural interventions – provided veritable stage sets for her investigation of the past as an aesthetic currency of the present. Other series of works like the Whispering Widows immediately spark the idea of a possibly complicated and rather gossipy female cast of protagonists.
Clare Goodwin studied at Winchester School of Art from 1993-1996 (BA Painting) and at the Royal College of Art, London from 1996-1998 (MA Painting). Solo exhibitions include sottovoce, Haus der Kunst St. Josef Solothurn (2020); Wallpainting, Last Tango, Zurich (2019); Constructive Nostalgia, CentrePasquArt, Biel (2016); Bradford Jolly, Christinger De Mayo Gallery, Zürich (2014); Unforced Errors, Southwark Park Galleries, London (2012); Kiss on the Blue, Rotwand Gallery, Zurich (2011).
Clare Goodwin – It’s All About
2 September – 21 October 2023
Clare Goodwin: DIDN’T I TELL YOU, I THINK I DID
24 October – 5 December 2020
Clare Goodwin: Whispering Widows
26 August – 7 October 2017
Le Grand Bleu: Group show with works by Anne-Lise Coste, Slawomir Elsner, Klodin Erb, Franziska Furter, Pierre Haubensak, Clare Goodwin, Sebastian Utzni and wiedemann/mettler
12 December 2020 – 23 January 2021
Correspondance: Clare Goodwin, Mamiko Otsubo, Pierre Haubensak, wiedemann/mettler and guests
8 February – 16 March 2019
With Other Eyes, group show with works by Anna Amadio, Michael Bauch, Benedikte Bjerre, Anne-Lise Coste, Slawomir Elsner, Klodin Erb, Franziska Furter, Clare Goodwin, Pierre Haubensak, Alex Heim, Jamie Isenstein, Mamiko Otsubo, Athena Vida, wiedemann/mettler, Bill Woodrow
26 May – 26 July 2018
Denise and Dennis by Clare Goodwin
www.nieves.ch
Five writers respond to Clare Goodwin’s painting Dennis and Denise (2018), offering narrative foils to Goodwin’s visual language. Dennis and Denise is neither described nor explained, but serves as a catalyst for literary experimentation. The texts, in turn, illustrate the painting’s wealth of implicit meaning.