This summer, the gateway to City Hall will be whimsically transformed by British artist Richard Woods. Cladding the property’s two security booths with a printed facade of cartoon-like red bricks, Woods draws on his native vernacular which identifies this design as an inexpensive structural style. The visually dynamic work dramatically juxtaposes the historic architecture of City Hall, an early expression of the City’s cosmopolitanism, with ordinary building materials. Woods’ faux renovation continues inside City Hall on one of the doors within the lobby. Covering the door in a printed graphic that is a replication of itself, the artist creates an optical illusion. Woods includes all of the ornamental details of the original to produce a heightened and flattened sense of reality.
Richard Woods’ wall and door and roof is the Public Art Fund’s 20th exhibition at City Hall Park. “We are honored to have the Public Art Fund present another exhibition at City Hall Park to inspire and delight New Yorkers and visitors,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “New York City’s public art program is part of what makes our cultural scene so vibrant. What better canvas for Richard Woods’ ‘wall and door and roof’ than City Hall itself.”
Woods has been re-creating and re-envisioning objects and environments since the late 1990s. Fusing art, architecture, and design, the artist completely transforms structures and spaces. Woods has produced his own visual language of cartoon-like illustrations that exaggerate the formal elements of basic construction materials. Cobblestone, brick, wallpaper, and plywood are converted into graphic drawings that the artist uses to cover surfaces of interiors and exteriors to create vividly different surroundings that merge reality with fantasy.
In a sense, Woods’ work is always a riff on something else; a contemporary and theatrical interpretation of something classical or commonplace. His ties to art history are apparent, yet he is not interested in the contemporary notion of art as a precious object. Woods’ work allows you to walk on it, touch it, and exist within it. Woods is a great admirer of William Morris, whose preference for the flat use of line and color and aversion to “realistic” rendering or shading, revolutionized textile design in the 19th Century. Like Morris, who is known for his hands-on technique and multi-faceted practice, Woods infuses his own unique language into everything he does. For the 50th Venice Biennale, the artist covered the courtyard grounds of the Renaissance Venetian Palazzo in an exaggerated and fantastical cobblestone. At the Royal Academy of Art in London, Woods morphed the “proper” interior space with bursting images of flowers and cockatoos. For his recent solo exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York, Woods wrapped the entire space with his signature logos.
About Richard Woods
Richard Woods was born in Chester, England in 1966 and now lives and works in London. He received his MA at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1990. His first solo exhibition took place in Winchester, England in 1988, followed by Cargo at Arched Space, London in 1990. He was among nine artists selected for the Barclays Young Artist Award in 1991 (with an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London). Since 1994, Woods has had solo exhibitions in London, Athens, Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Turin. Woods currently has a solo exhibition on view at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York. He has done commissions and exhibitions with the Wimbledon School of Art at Oxford University, The Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds, Paul Smith in New York and Tokyo, and Comme des Garçons in Osaka. He did a site-specific installation with the London Underground’s Platform for Art at Leicester Square station (2006) and was in the Liverpool Biennial (2008).
Location and Directions
City Hall Park is located in Lower Manhattan, bordered by Broadway, Chambers Street, Centre Street, and Park Row.
Subways: A, C, E to Chambers Street; 4, 5, 6, J, M, Z to Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall; N, R to City Hall; 2, 3 to Park Place.
wall and door and roof is free to the public, although reservations are required for tours of City Hall and can be made by calling 311 or visiting www.nyc.gov.
