Martin Holman

Art Works in Wimbledon is proud to announce the publication of the first monograph on British artist Richard Woods, creator of RENOVATION in Wimbledon, August-September 2005

Richard Woods RENOVATION was commissioned by Art Works in Wimbledon. The project was selected as one of the five best exhibitions in London by the Guardian Guide and Independent Information in August and September 2005

Image RENOVATION near completion, August 2005

Richard Woods

Marco Livingstone and Gordon Burn

Published by Lund Humphries in association with

the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford

and Art Works in Wimbledon

This is the first monograph on the remarkable work of British artist Richard Woods (b.1966), one of a younger generation of artists whose sculptures and installations operate on the boundary between art, architecture and design. Whatever structures he takes as his starting point - the floor of a domestic house, the walls of a gallery, the courtyard of a convent or the external walls of a public building - they are all used as flat surfaces to be embellished with paint.

A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, Woods has shown extensively in Britain, continental Europe, Japan and the USA. Over the past five years, he has designed a spectacular store interior for the fashion house Comme des Garçons in Osaka and the mock Tudor refit of a private family home in upstate New York. In 2003, Import/Export Sculpture, Woods's impressively large crazy paving of a cloistered courtyard, formed the centrepiece of The Henry Moore Foundation's Stopover project at the 50th International Venice Biennale of Art. In 2005 he transformed two very different buildings in Oxford and Wimbledon with the same red and white, comic-book brick design to extraordinary and memorable effect.

Drawing on unpublished interviews with the artist and previously unseen documentation of earlier sculptures and installations, the art historian and independent curator Marco Livingstone charts the development of Woods's work since his days as an art student. The book focuses on the building-based projects completed since 2000, and many of these are further explored in extracts from an illuminating conversation between Woods and the writer and novelist Gordon Burn.

The book has been designed by Fraser Muggeridge in close consultation with Richard Woods.

Marco Livingstone is an art historian and independent curator who has written extensively on contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. His publications include Pop Art: A Continuing History (1990) and monographs and major exhibition catalogues on David Hockney, Jim Dine, R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, Tony Bevan, Tim Head, Michael Sandle and Duane Michals, among others. His book Hockney's Portraits and People (2003), co-authored with Kay Heymer, was awarded the 2004 Sir Bannister Fletcher Award for best book on the arts. His most recent book, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, was published in 2005 by Lund Humphries.

Gordon Burn's first novel, Alma Cogan (1991), won a Whitbread Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. His second novel, Fullalove (1995), was also longlisted for the Booker. His most recent novel is The North of England Home Service (2003). Non-fiction works include On the Way to Work (2001), a collaboration with the artist Damien Hirst.