Richard Woods

A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, Woods has shown extensively in Britain, continental Europe, Japan and the USA. Over the past five years, he has designed a spectacular store interior for the fashion house Comme des Garçons in Osaka and the mock Tudor refit of a private family home in upstate New York. In 2003, Import/Export Sculpture, Woods's impressively large crazy paving of a cloistered courtyard, formed the centrepiece of The Henry Moore Foundation's Stopover project at the 50th International Venice Biennale of Art.

Drawing on unpublished interviews with the artist and previously unseen documentation of earlier sculptures and installations, the art historian and independent curator Marco Livingstone charts the development of Woods's work since his days as an art student. The book focuses on the building-based projects completed since 2000, and many of these are further explored in extracts from an illuminating conversation between Woods and the writer and novelist Gordon Burn. The publication is lavishly illustrated, and comprises a beautifully produced record of all the artist's major works to date.

This is the first monograph on the remarkable work of British artist Richard Woods (b.1966), one of a younger generation of artists whose sculptures and installations operate on the boundary between art, architecture and design. Whatever structures he takes as his starting point - the floor of a domestic house, the walls of a gallery, the courtyard of a convent or the external walls of a public building - they are all used as flat surfaces to be embellished with paint.

A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, Woods has shown extensively in Britain, continental Europe, Japan and the USA. Over the past five years, he has designed a spectacular store interior for the fashion house Comme des Garçons in Osaka and the mock Tudor refit of a private family home in upstate New York. In 2003, Import/Export Sculpture, Woods's impressively large crazy paving of a cloistered courtyard, formed the centrepiece of The Henry Moore Foundation's Stopover project at the 50th International Venice Biennale of Art.

Drawing on unpublished interviews with the artist and previously unseen documentation of earlier sculptures and installations, the art historian and independent curator Marco Livingstone charts the development of Woods's work since his days as an art student. The book focuses on the building-based projects completed since 2000, and many of these are further explored in extracts from an illuminating conversation between Woods and the writer and novelist Gordon Burn. The publication is lavishly illustrated, and comprises a beautifully produced record of all the artist's major works to date.

Marco Livingstone is an art historian and independent curator who has written extensively on contemporary painting, sculpture and photography. His publications include Pop Art: A Continuing History (1990) and monographs and major exhibition catalogues on David Hockney, Jim Dine, R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones, Tony Bevan, Tim Head, Michael Sandle and Duane Michals, among others. His book Hockney's Portraits and People (2003), co-authored with Kay Heymer, was awarded the 2004 Sir Bannister Fletcher Award for best book on the arts. His most recent book, Patrick Caulfield: Paintings, was published in 2005 by Lund Humphries.

Gordon Burn's first novel, Alma Cogan (1991), won a Whitbread Award and was long listed for the Booker Prize. His second novel, Fullalove (1995), was also long listed for the Booker. His most recent novel is The North of England Home Service (2003). Non-fiction works include On the Way to Work (2001), a collaboration with the artist Damien Hirst.