Richard Woods: The Ideal Home Exhibition

New work by Richard Woods (b. 1966) will be unveiled in The Ideal Home Exhibition at the Alan Cristea Gallery, London, from 21 June - 31 July 2018. New sculptures, paintings, and prints take as their subject notions of taste and the cult of home improvement.   

The Ideal Home Exhibition features brightly coloured mini cartoon homes, designed to look like traditional British bun-galows that play on the idea of sought-after locations. They will be shown together with large paintings, each measuring between one and two metres in width, which depict houses that are half built or are adorned with new ‘must-have’ features. Woods has humorously titled these works; Dig down to make space for a swimming pool, and Installing a green roof is simple and affordable.  These densely inked compositions will be shown together with small framed paintings from a series entitled Hand Held Landscapes, 2017. These works combine an interest in portable medieval panel paintings that were folded up and carried by worshippers in their pockets for private devotion as well as referencing the generic greenbelt ‘land for sale’ images offered in estate agent windows.  The exhibition will also include Dream Homes, 2018, a new series of eight prints, a combination of woodblock and stencil, which takes as its central motif the black outline of a house. Each print is layered with Woods’ classic brick, tile, wood and stone patterns and designs.   

Woods, who originally trained as a sculptor, will take part in Frieze Sculpture Park, Regent’s Park, London. Holiday Home (Regent’s Park), 2018, a sculpture one third the size of an actual house will be on free public display in London from 4 July - 7 October 2018.  A month-long site-specific installation entitled Upgrade, 2018, by Woods, that engages with issues of housing, will also feature a mini home inside a skip in Hoxton Square, London, as part of the Skip Gallery's collaboration with the London Festival of Architecture, on show from 1 - 30 June 2018.