Clare Goodwin’s Berlin show, Rumours, presents the artists new paintings and ceramic assemblages – her first show with FWR Gallery.

Rumours evokes stories and messages whose truth remains uncertain or ambiguous. Likewise, Goodwin’s canvases appear at first glance as seemingly utopian abstractions, loosely aligned with the Zurich Concrete tradition. Yet on closer inspection, they reveal conspicuous blockages and voids, and a nuanced palette that points toward the social dynamics embedded in her compositional decisions.

“My ruler is the social space, not the calculator,” the artist states. The distances she measures are invisible lines – those that shape human relationships: between partners, relatives, colleagues, or friends. They are abstract degrees of closeness and tension, reflected in her modulated tones drawn from everyday interior environments.

Goodwin’s striking ceramic assemblages, with their distinctive shapes, figures, colors, sheen, and rhythms, appear like the embodied counterpart to her paintings — a translation of the canvas into spatial form. A painting, Goodwin notes, begins with abstraction; a ceramic begins as matter. Clay must be physically shaped, and its intimately tactile process allows for the presence of chance and loss of control — visible in the charming irregularities of asymmetry and texture.

Together, Goodwin’s paintings and ceramics form an ensemble that oscillates between abstraction and lived space.