Clare Goodwin (b. 1973, Birmingham, UK) is a Zurich-based artist whose practice combines geometric precision with the principles of hard-edge minimal abstraction. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, Goodwin has lived and worked in Zurich since 2001. Her work explores the intersection of modernist abstraction with the architecture and aesthetics of everyday life. Through painting, drawing, ceramics, sculptural assemblage and spatial installations, Goodwin draws from domestic visual languages—such as modular kitchens, interiors, and standardized furniture systems—transforming them into sharply composed visual systems allowing new meaning to unfold. Her hard-edged abstract paintings reference geometric systems and color schemes drawn from the built environments, particularly mid-century design, but always with a conceptual interest in the politics of taste, identity, and social conditioning.

Rooted in a rigorous formalism, Goodwins painting practice is deeply concerned with spatial relationships — both within the frame and in relation to its surroundings often working in series, allowing a motif or structure to be re-articulated across multiple canvases. These are not only exercises in abstraction but acts of mapping—coded reflections on personal memory, gendered space, and cultural history. The grid, the stripe, or the edge often serve as structural devices for these reflections. More recently, she has been working with one-to-one architectural proportions taken from modular domestic elements, such as standard kitchen units, to develop both compositions and their conceptual framework.

Alongside painting, Goodwins spatial installations and assemblages use pre-owned domestic objects which she reconfigures into sculptural settings that evoke absence and psychological residue. These are often exhibited in dialogue with the paintings, forming immersive environments that echo the tension between abstraction and experience. Goodwins ceramic works similarly shift between function and form, with their glazes, shapes, and surface treatments often echoing painterly logics.

Goodwin is interested in abstraction not as an isolated formal language but as a tool for framing and critiquing social norms—especially those embedded in design, domestic roles, and aesthetic hierarchies. Her work is also influenced by the socio-political histories of the places she has lived and exhibited in. Having grown up in the UK, and living and working in Zurich, Switzerland for over two decades, I am especially attuned to how visual languages travel across cultural and class contexts.

Clare Goodwin’s work has been showcased in numerous solo and group exhibitions at venues in Switzerland and Europe. Notable institutional exhibitions include Kunsthaus Aarau, Kunsthaus PasquArt Biel, Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, SKK Soest in Germany, Kunstmuseum Olten, Villa Renata Basel, and Southwark Park Galleries in London. 

Recently she has participated in the 4th Industrial Art Biennale in Istria, Croatia, the exhibition Backstage Engelberg and ‘Sound of the earth, Ceramics in Contemporary art, Kunstmuseum Appenzell.