Night Gallery returned to Freize LA this year
Installation view of Night Gallery at Frieze Los Angeles, Booth A14 Santa Monica Airport, February 26–March 1, 2026 Photography courtesy Night Gallery
Accomplished British painter and elected Royal Academician Clare Woods is known for her distinctive approach to painting, inspired by a background in sculpture. Working primarily with aluminum panels as her support, Woods has developed a unique, signature style of wet-into-wet brushwork, creating richly textured, voluminous gestures with aluminum sheen peeking through. Using her own photographs as source material, she transforms stillness through deliberate yet intuitive mark-making, resulting in works that hover between still-life and pure painterly expression.
Installation view of Night Gallery at Frieze Los Angeles, Booth A14, Santa Monica Airport, February 26–March 1, 2026. Photography courtesy Night Gallery
Woods’ new paintings, made for Frieze Los Angeles, were inspired by her visit to The Huntington Gardens. Working from her own photographs, Woods approached these subjects with the fresh perspective of a British painter encountering Californian vegetation for the first time. Woods’ bold color palette and fluid brushstrokes imbue her subjects with an emotional intensity that transcends traditional botanical painting, revealing both the beauty and underlying fragility of natural forms. The works offer an exquisite meditation on the tradition of memento mori—the artistic reminder of mortality and the fleeting nature of beauty.
The presentation's largest work, The Controller (2025), captures a hand-carved white spiral staircase unfurling within a lush, vertiginous setting. Bamboo leaves and palm fronds overtake the staircase’s architecture in bold, cascading gestures. Woods' wet-on-wet technique makes visible each turn of her brush while an ombre background melts verdant greens into turquoise blues, creating an atmosphere that is at once aquatic and tropical. In The Draw Back and Show Through (both works 2025), Woods turns to stained glass, her technique beautifully suited to capturing translucent, layered hues, the sun’s luminosity pouring in through the other side.
Installation view of Night Gallery at Frieze Los Angeles, Booth A14, Santa Monica Airport, February 26–March 1, 2026. Photography courtesy Night Gallery
Night Gallery’s website can be found here for more information about this fair, along with present and future exhibitions. To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze, sign up for the newsletter here and follow on Instagram, X, and Frieze Official on Facebook.
