The work of American artist Coral Woodbury examines art history, archives, and material culture for their absences and echoes. Her current research around the re-presenting of women is realized in paintings, drawings, and in her signature Revised Edition series. With it, Woodbury creates a material intervention in the inherited Western canon, painting artist-women into the history which denied their existence. Inked-over pages, torn from Janson’s History of Art, gather a chorus of female artists. When complete, Revised Edition will total 617 portraits, and testify against the erasure of women and the hierarchies imposed on the work of their hands. In parallel, Woodbury’s oil paintings imagine different pasts which would beget a different present, exploring the possibility of hope in a poetics of history.
From rural New York (b.1971) Woodbury studied at Binghamton University (BFA) and made her way to Florence to study painting. Thirty years on, the artist-teachers she met there, collectively called rosenclaire, and a cohort of 90 other international artists, continue to work together. An MA and museum career informed her search for the buried stories of women across time and place. Art has been her path to engage in communities and lands from Kathmandu to Cuba, Italy to Ireland, where her work responds to the site and its historical resonances. Recent honors include Cill Rialaig residency (Ireland); International Mother Art Prize, Finalist (UK); and exhibition at Newport Art Museum (RI). She exhibits internationally, and her work is held in public and private collections, including Katrin Bellinger Collection and The Women’s Art Collection, University of Cambridge.
Woodbury is represented by HackelBury Fine Art, London.
Considering Art Podcast – Coral Woodbury, painter: Interview by Bob Chaundy.
Medium and Memory: Griselda Pollock and Gilane Tawadros: A discussion between curator Griselda Pollock and Whitechapel Director Gilane Tawardros on why medium still matters to artists engaging with memory — personal, historical, cultural, forgotten, discovered, restored. Moderated by curator, advisor and consultant Beth Greenacre.
Coral Woodbury & Griselda Pollock, In Conversation, from HackelBury Fine Art and New Hall Art Collection, University of Cambridge
Solo exhibition, Palimpsest, HackelBury Fine Art, London
“Exhibition Diary” The World of Interiors, Condé Nast (UK) Vol 41 no. 1, January 2022
Solo exhibition, Revised Edition, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston
40IN40ENA, (translation: Forty in Quarantine), Palazzo Barolo, Turin, Italy
Mother Art Prize Finalist Exhibition, Cromwell Place, London
International Traveling Art Exhibition, Contemporary Art Gallery, Taragaon Museum, Kathmandu, Nepal
VANITAS#IMPERMANENCE, Traveling Exhibition: Palazzo Reale, Genova; Duino Castle, Trieste, Italy; B#S Gallery, ioDeposito, Treviso, Italy
Vanitas, Palazzo Reale
IMPERMANENCE — An exhibition on fragility
“Tre Tele di Coral Woodbury alla Mostra Impermanence” (Three Paintings by Coral Woodbury in the Exhibition Impermanence), Trip Advisor