No Straight Lines: Evan Woodruffe

Evan Woodruffe creates lively painterly environments. His visual language has been likened to ‘mapping’ – creating luscious surfaces and abstract landscapes with multiple points of departure for viewers.

No Straight Lines pursues dialogues between painting and our everyday surroundings, embracing immersive scale and texture. The artist has collaged fabric from his old shirts onto some of the canvases and incorporated found and commonplace materials – such as flattened metal, coloured plastic, dead leaves, earth and fur – into the painting process.

Woodruffe’s artistic practice spans painting on canvas, to works that play with reproductions of painted imagery – sometimes extending into textiles, architecture, cars, furniture and other objects. He embraces the experiential and decorative functions of painting, and its role in our visual culture at large.

In No Straight Lines, the artist is specifically interested in creative possibilities of tiled and multi-panel works – pushing against rigid architectural structures with meandering mark-making. Woodruffe describes a painting made of several pieces has “no fixed perspective … it can follow the architecture of a room, folding itself into the corners … around the viewer to encompass their periphery.”

Evan Woodruffe (b. 1965) lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Woodruffe has an MFA from Elam School of Fine Arts and exhibited in a range of public galleries throughout Aotearoa including Tauranga Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and Whakatane Museum. His work has featured in the Beijing Biennale (2019) and the 5th Auckland Triennial (2013).