CLEVELAND, Ohio — Things are starting to click nicely for Cleveland artist Nikki Woods, whose current show at Hedge Gallery is full of brushy, colorful images radiating a sense that they were as fun to make as they are to see.
Woods has served since early 2018 as director of the Reinberger Gallery at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she graduated in 2012 with a bachelor of fine arts degree in painting.
While tending to business at her alma mater, she’s also been developing nicely as a maker of paintings that emphatically express the nature of their medium.
Woods paints in a way that emphasizes the distinctness and velocity of seemingly every stroke of a brush. The art-historical term for this quality is “painterly.”
But the show, on view through Friday, also offers a snapshot of Woods’ obsession with images that subvert a kind of sexy femininity originally intended to reward the male gaze, from Playboy bunnies to Picasso-esque femmes fatales to fashion models in heavy makeup.
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Perhaps most striking is Woods’ closeup painting of a beautiful woman’s disembodied head cupped nicely in a champagne glass. Painted in shrieking, electric hues of cobalt violet, blood red, yellow and green, it’s hideous, glamorous, and irresistible.
Woods’ paintings are loose, playful, and firmly tongue-in-cheek.
“Make no mistake, these paintings are not moralistic, nor are they cautionary tales,’’ she says in a statement on her website.
If it’s clear what Woods’ paintings are not about, it’s also equally clear that they’re about an artist eager to permit herself to let it rip when she’s in front of a canvas.
Her layered surfaces enable a viewer to see how she thinks with a brush in her hand, layering skeins of harmonic and occasionally astringent colors in ways that almost never blur into mud.
For all the show’s vitality, it also conveys a sense that Woods is still warming up, still seeking a way of generating imagery more complex than the bust-length studies of women’s faces that dominate the Hedge show.
She seems to be heading in a direction charted by other contemporary artists such as Angela Dufresne, a Brooklyn, New York-based painter who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Dufresne’s tactics include appropriating scenes from movies as jumping-off points for flights of lush, virtuosic brushwork.
In a similar way, Woods seems to use pop culture imagery as a prompt for improvisations in which the outcome is never certain, but in which the discoveries made along the way are what it’s all about.
At the same time, the show at Hedge feels like a prelude to something bigger. Woods’ paintings make it easy to wonder how she’d tackle bigger compositions with multiple human figures arranged in more complex narrative situations.
In other words, the show leaves you wanting more from Woods and wondering where she’ll go next. For an artist on the rise, and for her audience, that’s not a bad place to be.
REVIEW
What’s up: “Vivid Wild Things: Paintings by Nikki Woods.
Venue: Hedge Gallery
Where: 1300 W. 78th St., Cleveland.
When: Through Friday, Sept. 3.
Admission: Free. Call 216-650-4201 or go to hedgeartgallery.com.
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Cleveland artist Nikki Woods fills Hedge Gallery with luscious, brushy send-ups of femininity and romance - cleveland.com
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