Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to announce The Nature Show, Richard Woods’ first solo exhibition at the gallery. Woods works with existing architecture and materials to completely transform structures and spaces, engaging them with reality and fantasy. He has been re-creating and re-envisioning objects and environments since the late 1990s. Plywood and household gloss are used to employ the traditional technique of wood block printmaking technique in order to cover surfaces of interiors and exteriors that create vividly different graphic surroundings. Woods has done numerous projects and commissions in New York and throughout the U.S.; this will be his first large-scale exhibition in the States since 2002.

Covering the gallery floors with the cartoonish line drawings of flowers from his Floral repeat series (begun in 2000) on a vivid orange background, Woods’ signature wood panel logo series wraps the gallery walls floor to ceiling. A new series called Song Thrush of what the artist calls “reversed repeat tiles” flank the window walls facing the street. The installation also features a selection of Woods’ paintings, created with household paint on panels made from leftover floorboards inlayed into raw plywood. These paintings have been integrated into the artists practice in the last few years and are integral to his process.

Woods is constantly experimenting, making things in the studio, formulating and finalizing his ideas through doing. The DIY nature of the work feeds into the activation of a space or object. The work is always in a sense, a riff on something else—vernacular architecture, found objects and materials—a contemporary and theatrical interpretation of something classical or perhaps “regular.” Woods’ work is both witty and illusionistic; there is an optimism and liberalism to the work literally and conceptually. Duchamp’s ready-mades, Artschwager’s use of synthetic materials (wood grain in particular), and James Turrell’s use of existing grounds and phenomenology of perception can all be called upon as references. Woods’ ties to art history are apparent, yet he is not interested in the contemporary notion of art as a precious object—his work allows us to walk on it, touch it, exist within it. A great admirer of William Morris, whose preference for the flat use of line and color and abhorrence of “realistic” rendering or shading revolutionized textile design in the 19th Century. Like Morris, who is known for his hands-on technique and multi-faceted practic e, Woods infuses his own unique language in everything that he does.

For the 50th Venice Biennale, Woods transformed the grounds of a Renaissance Venetian Palazzo, rendering the courtyard grounds in exaggerated cobblestone of fantastical white, black and grey. At the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Wood’s bursting images of flora and fauna in Two cockatoos (red), in conjunction with the building’s traditional details, morphs the “proper” interior space.