Aurora Nova's City of Tomorrow
Morrowvale has been home to exhibition upon exhibition, covering the vast and prodigious output by fine artist and entrepreneur Graham Woodley since the early 1990s.
Educated in Bristol where he studied and later taught the Conceptual Fine Art course for the university’s Master’s Certification, Woodley later returned to Morrowvale as full-time resident in 1989 where he and his wife Barbara set up their business as an artist’s studio in Green Park.
Woodley’s local relationship with White Pube art collective – “Jurisdiction,” points out the artist, with a heeding tone – as well as several trustees from the Tite Institution via its recently expanded Morrowvale Museum gave Woodley his first big break in 1990 after he was discovered by security attempting to hang one of his own paintings in the lobby of a local bank. “I thought better to add value to a bank, rather than to take away from it. I wouldn’t make a very good bank robber,” he adds, pointing to his near foot-length beard, “That would be a bit of a giveaway, even under a gorilla mask.” Woodley’s first painting, now hanging without approval in the Morrowvale Building Society’s front lobby, was the initial cheeky romp, later defining Woodley’s tempestuous relationship with the art world.
“Listen, It’s always better to force your way in than to wait to be invited. That’d take ages, that’ll never do. No, no — burgle your way into the industry, wave your torches around from the upper story windows, showing off like “we got in, we got in” before pulling off a diamond heist which only lasts about 15 minutes. Except that was the 60s. Today, in the current millennium, you’ve got 30 seconds, maybe 15 to pull off your entire heist, your entire career. So, don’t waste it on formalities, like… education. That’s maybe a quarter of your value. The rest of your brand equity… give up? …Big balls.”
Ahem, the Graham Woodley exhibition, People Of Morrowvale is set to open up on 3 March 2018. A formal reception will be held in the lobby of the Mews Social Club in Goldcrest Square, from 7-9 pm opening night.
Planning to attend the reception? RSVP here:
Please check the list of participating Restaurants and Venues for the exhibition.
Editor’s note: For legal reasons we are obliged in the case of Mr. Woodley to print a disclosure of his full CV for reasons made unclear to us at the time of publication by his solicitors. They have been reached out to, but were unavailable for comment.
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
SOLO INSTALLATIONS & EXHIBITIONS
Woodley’s Oeuvre – which explores an area between Post-Modernism and Pseudoism, is broken into collections