PRESS PREVIEW: Saturday 18 May 2013.  Free bus from London departing Tate Britain (Millbank) at 10 a.m. and leaving Roche Court at 3 p.. m. Seats are limited.  Please contact the New Art Centre to reserve a place.  For further information about the exhibition and for images, please contact Stephen Feeke on 01980 862244 or nac@sculpture.uk.com.

The New Art Centre is proud to announce an exhibition of new sculpture by Eva Rothschild and new paintings by Clare Woods. These two artists have both shown separately at Roche Court in the past and they proposed the idea of showing their work together in the Gallery here for the first time. Eva and Clare met whilst they were students at Goldsmith’s and have remained close friends. Whilst they have made their own distinctive work especially for this exhibition, they share an interest in colour, surface, shape and form which creates a great synergy between their respective practices. They have also proposed an exhibition of work by other artists; entitled Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? after Richard Hamilton’s iconic collage, it brings together artworks which respond to the unique setting of the Artists’ House.

Eva Rothschild has developed a varied but instantly recognisable sculptural vocabulary. This includes woven coils, lumpen masses, totems, leather fringing and slender rods of painted wood and metal. Whilst her work is clearly informed by the legacy of minimal 1960s sculpture and slick geometric forms fabricated through industrial processes, at the same time it is indebted to homespun techniques and traditional crafts. Often brightly coloured, the results occupy an entire gallery space, using every available surface her work seems to defy gravitational and material limitations, perching on spindly stands on the floor, jutting out from the ceiling, arching precariously overhead or appearing to hover magically in mid-air. Though each sculpture is treated by Rothschild as distinct and indiv idual, together they often appear like a stage-set, an overall installation suggesting each work has a significant part within an unfolding narrative, waiting to be animated by the viewer. Rothschild’s recent exhibitions include the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; The Hepworth Wakefield; Kunstverein Hannover; Cold Corners at Tate Britain; South London Gallery and Kunsthalle Zurich. Her work is also in major collections around the world such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and Tate, London. The exhibition at Roche Court includes two recent works sited outside in the Sculpture Park.

Clare Woods is renowned for her depictions of the English landscape which evoke the Neo-Romantic traditions of mid-twentieth-century artists such as Sutherland, Nash and Piper; the dark side of the landscape she portrays, shaped and scarred by human activity, creates a sense of unease and disquiet offset by her painting’s glossy, colourful surfaces. Recently, however, her work has changed. Woods is now using oil, instead of enamel paint, giving her work a greater luminosity and subtlety of tone and texture, and she has also begun to concern herself with different kinds of subject matter. The human presence is now more defined, a turning point which came at the time of her exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, in which the Yorkshire landscape of Moore and Hepworth looked like faces and figures. This departure is entirely logical since Woods first studied sculpture and her means of painting has always relied upon using paint structurally and in layers. The exhibition at Roche Court includes her more familiar landscapes alongside recent portrayals of figurative sculptures by Paolozzi, Bourgeois and Giacometti. Clare Woods’ most recent exhibitions include Southampton City Art Gallery; The Hepworth Wakefield and Chisenhale Gallery, London. In 2012 she also completed a permanent outdoor commission for the Olym pic Park, London. Her work is in major collections including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Colección VAC, Valencia; National Collection of Wales; Arts Council Collection; British Council and Government Art Collection.