The Age of Super Tudor, Art Review

Bettina von Hase braves the forests of upstate New York to visit the collector’s house by artist Richard Woods that makes a mockery of mock-Tudor

Imagine a Hansel and Gretel house for grown-ups. nestling by a rushing river in the big, dark woods where black bears prowl, just two hours' drive from New York: this is what British artist Richard Woods has created for US collector Adam Lindemann, a work of art called Super Tudor which just happens to be a house you can actually live in. Super Tudor’s aspect is as spectacular as its new Tudor-style exterior, an English vernacular that sits perfectly in the Catskills Mountains overlooking the Sawkill river. The river is the reason Lindemann bought the house: "I came to see it on a rainy day, it was horrible weather, you couldn't see the house. But when I opened the car door, all I heard was the rushing water, sshhh, this was post — 9/11 New York, I loved this therapeutic, mystical, meditational sound."

Lindemann, a 42-year-old radio broadcasting entrepreneur, didn't want to tear the house down; a light went off in his head when he remembered a show he had seen in September 2002 at Jeffrey Deitch's gallery in Soho, New York, where Woods had 'tudored' the gallery facade, covered the floors with mock parquetry and the walls with floor-to-ceiling parrot prints, and filled the space with garden sculptures. "I thought, 'let's bring that British guy over here, him take a look at the house, and see if he can fix it"'. Woods came over and liked what he saw: "it looked like a sad wannabe version of a northern European, particularly Germanesque house. The roof structure was already there — the idea was that we would push it".

Woods, 37, is good at 'pushing it'. This is his first house project, with both exterior and interior spaces. but in his work to date he has transformed unremarkable rooms, floors, walls, ceilings into memorable, iconic pieces, blending a pop sensibility with consummate craftsmanship to highlight both the architect's aspiration and our current DIN obsession. "I wanted to make a mock-mock Tudor house, twice removed. It's as much about the way people in the 1950s and 60s tudorised their houses as it is about the real I don't want to appear sneery or arrogant, I want to show my admiration", Woods says. The effect is one of poignancy rather than satire; Woods may send up suburban pretensions and home ownership, but he does so in a fond rather than sarcastic way.

Born in Chester, a Victorian reconstruction of a medieval town, Woods studied at Winchester and then at the Slade in London. He showed a fountain work at the Royal Academy in 2002 and an enormous crazy-paving floor at the last Venice biennale, both installations highly relevant to Super Tudor through their preoccupation with architectural aspiration. Woods shows the desire to remake an architectural style rather than the style itself. "I'm very romantic in the way I want to make work, the craftsmanship is romantic. The imagery isn't, because you're very aware that it is all taken out of context".

This dissonance is very apparent at Super Tudor, which exudes a kind of psychedelic fairy-tale charm with a postmodern edge, the latter heightened by the dynamic river and the bears who occasionally stray onto the field looking for food. On arrival, the fountain at the end of the driveway greets you with garden sculptures of classical statues, angels, Buddhas and American Indians — on closer inspection, all 'mistakes' as Lindemann describes them. They are broken, with arms, legs and wings missing, both send-ups of traditional garden architecture and signals to expect the unexpected. You open the front door of the black-and-white timbered house, dressed up in "Tudor cladding, and step into an open-plan kitchen/living room, walls covered in large-scale block prints of parrots in lime-green on white, a direct reference to the tropical, post- colonial imagery of the 1950s. There are four Marc Newson chairs in citrus colours around a table, and Woods prints of sailing-boats in baby-blue, paying homage to stock country-house pictures or the kind you would find in a pub: "This imagery is classless — sailing-boats, cathedrals — both kitsch and fine art. You go to a stately home and there is a sailing-boat, then you go to a pub, and there is one on the wall", Woods says.

The floor — called 'logo' and made of screened and laminated plywood — is a Woods signature: "They're all called 'logo' because they operate like logos in the different environments where they are installed — they absorb and change what's already there". The interior works are made by routing out enormous print blocks, each with a different wood-like grainy pattern. The effect is one of blown-up herringbone pattern, a cartoonish black faux wood-grain on brown and yellow; each colour has a signature pattern and determines the sequence of the floor.

Although Super Tudor comments on the crossover between art, interior design and architecture, it is a work of art rather than a work of design. 'There are two histories, of art and of design. Often one wants to keep the other away, usually art wants to keep design away, but they run in parallel, sometimes they meet and then they go apart again. My work has been about the fact that these two run side by side. I don't want to think of any differences, but if there is one, design is thinking about the client, whereas I am not interested in that at all", Woods says.

Lindemann shared this vision of non-interference: "I didn't want it to be decorated, I wanted it to be really representative of what the work is all about". Instead, he has hung works from his extensive collection, among them a Warhol ink drawing and two spin paintings made by Damien Hirst's son Cassian for two of Lindemann's three daughters, in pride of place above their beds. Lindemann, who describes the project as turning a "sow's ear into a silk purse", went to town on furnishing the two-storey, three-bedroom house with spectacular 1970s furniture by American designer Paul Evans bought from a store on New York's lower east side called Las Venus.

The space-age, 1960s Barbarella aesthetic, crossed with Woods's multi-layered imagination, succeeds brilliantly at confounding expectations about art, design, and how we live with both. "l like artists who collapse different historical periods", Deitch comments. love the way Richard looks at William Morris. the arts and crafts school, things from a 100 years ago which he gives a contemporary sensibility. The Tudor structure is like some sort of bizarre combination of Tudor, Mondrian and Victor Vasarely". This quality is something its owner is keenly aware of: "it's open to uncertainty, and open to many different Interpretations — that's what makes up its artistic strength".