Evan Woodruffe (b.1965) brings the extraordinary into the ordinary. Whether on a wall or a luxury motorcar, his paintings build complex relationships between colour and pattern to form what writer Lucinda Bennett referred to as Wet Maps, “living, breathing ecosystems, and visualisations of a new kind of urbanism”, where the world itself is fluid and porous.

Exhibition

All colours appear in nature, but rarely all at once. On canvas they appear in strokes, swathes, washes, and dollops. Corners are populated by deep mauve vessels. Entire paintings are taken over by swarms of delicate blue circles. Backgrounds are blackened orange skies, are scratched reds, are turned an illusory purple by the obsessive layering of turquoise over spicy pink. On Evan Woodruffe’s canvases, colours bump up against each other in ways we rarely see outside of a rainforest, where shining green leaves fall to the ground, turning to vibrant fungus, to dark humus, to fresh, miraculous sprouts.