BIO

Kelly Woods (b. 1966, Los Angeles) received an acceptance to Otis College of Art and Design in mid-1980s but had already established a full-time Studio Assistant business, and opted to continue working closely with artists such as Billy Al Bengston, Charles Christopher Hill, Mary Corse and Frank Lloyd, both in his studio and at his gallery. She concurrently developed and expanded her own artistic practice.   

Since 2009, Woods has exhibited widely in Los Angeles including solo exhibitions at TAJ Art Gallery and Saatchi Arts’ The Other Art Fair, a two-person show at Modfellow’s in Nashville, TN, and group exhibitions including Golden Bird at Edward Cella Gallery and How They Ran at Over the Influence. Her work was included in the Southern California / Baja Biennial at the San Diego Art Institute in 2016. Woods and her work have been featured in several publications including LAWeekly, Peripheral Vision Press, Art and Cake, and FULL BLEDE.

Known for her hard-edge, geometric abstract paintings, Woods’ works explore visual perception, color theory, and pattern. Although formal aspects of the Light and Space movement are present, she eschews minimalism with the addition of glitter and soft textiles, such as fake fur. Viewers themselves activate the works, which shift in color, tone, and light as their eyes and body moves across and in front of the surface. Working on panel, canvas, and paper, she paints autonomous, color field paintings of dynamic shapes, often with complimentary colors. The color selections are painstakingly selected to induce an after-image, a hallucinatory effect causing the viewer to perceive a temporary glow in their vision.

In the summer of 2023, Woods moved studios and spent the next two years making oil paintings which did not include geometric abstraction and did not include glitter. Recently, Woods began a new body of geometric abstraction with a markedly different approach, favoring softer edges, subdued color (for now), and intentional irregularities, with glitter resurfacing only in quiet traces.

STATEMENT

My previous body of work, hard-edge geometric abstractions with some formal elements of Light and Space, color theory and lots of glitter, came to a halt in the summer of 2023. I was getting restless, feeling like I had pushed those works as far as I could and I needed a change. For the next two years, I made anything I wanted to make, working primarily in oil. In July of 2025, preparing to move studios again, I slashed a large portion of those paintings off their stretcher bars and threw them away. I have since returned to geometric abstraction but from a different angle—looser, more open, with a softer hand and new materials, informed by the freedom and experimentation of the last two years.