HUDSON, New York — Brenda Goodman is 81 years outdated and has been the topic of solo exhibitions since 1973. Her artwork is unimaginable to characterize. She has by no means developed a signature fashion, nor aligned herself with abstraction or figuration. I’ve reviewed eight of her reveals and just lately visited her studio within the Catskills, but there’s nonetheless extra to see and say about her work. For that reason, I traveled to Hudson to see A Lengthy Journey: Work from 1989 to 2024 at Pamela Salisbury Gallery.
I believe Goodman’s refusal to slot in and make seductive work has lengthy been held towards her, significantly in New York. Between 1994 and 2011, she painted a sequence of enormous, harrowing, psychologically pushed self-portraits through which she appeared to have peeled away all decorum to disclose figures possessed by ravenous, feral need, as they crammed gobs of paint, signifying meals, into their mouths. This was the artist’s interpretation of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” (1820–23). In distinction to Goya, Goodman by no means recognized what her figures have been madly consuming. As a lot as these portraits have been about her, they have been additionally about us.
Brenda Goodman, “Pandemic 3” (2020), oil and blended media on wooden, 32 x 27 inches (81.28 x 68.58 cm)
Brenda Goodman, “This is the House that Jack Built” (2022), oil and blended media on wooden, 38 x 47 inches (96.52 x 119.38 cm)
In accordance with my on-line search, neither the Whitney Museum of American Artwork nor the Museum of Fashionable Artwork has something by Goodman of their collections. Is it as a result of New York establishments can’t cope with an artist who’s so direct in her rawness, preferring as an alternative cool surfaces and ironic gestures?
In 2015, I flew to Detroit to see a big survey of Goodman’s work and drawings on the Faculty for Artistic Research (CCS), organized by Michelle Perron, together with a survey of her works on paper at Paul Kotula Initiatives, in a close-by Michigan suburb. The CCS present included work relationship from the early Sixties, when she was a pupil on the college (then known as the College of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts). These exhibitions supplied an in depth view of a posh artist whose work have by no means appeared like anybody else’s.
The 21 work within the present exhibition run the gamut from representational views to abstractions, together with combos of figural and summary components, and biomorphic and geometric abstractions. There are work that resist any studying, invite symbolic readings, and mix the legible with the illegible. Regardless of all the range, Goodman’s artworks are unmistakable of their capability to disturb, even when they’re summary.
Brenda Goodman, “Untitled” (2012), oil on wooden, 24 x 20 inches (60.96 x 50.8 cm)
Take “Find It – It’s Yours” (2021), a largely grey and black portray with a cluster of irregular geometric shapes in several colours within the higher left-hand nook above a block of stable grey. A tangle of black traces fills the central space of the image airplane. Earlier than Goodman began this portray, she incised the wooden floor, leaving a tracery of cuts the paint solely partially covers. The interaction between the scarred floor and the community of black traces is simply one of many many collisions we discover in her work.
Considered one of Goodman’s nice work of her studio, “Studio 3” (2023), depicts a big pinkish-red portray on an easel set towards a multi-hued, pastel wall of composed horizontal streaks and rivulets of paint. Two work lean towards the wall, one atop the opposite, on the left facet, whereas a vertical grid portray hangs on the wall to the proper. The triangular kind filling the easel portray reminded this viewer, at the least, of a witch’s hat. What each disrupts and elevates the picture is the thickly painted, coal black kind abutting the easel portray. Whereas all the things else within the work is legible, this isn’t.
Brenda Goodman, “Studio 3” (2023), oil and blended media on wooden, 45 x 58 inches (114.3 x 147.32 cm)
One other nice studio portray is “Quandary” (2011). In a big soiled white room, we see the artist wanting again over her shoulder. Has our presence interrupted her? A colour chart and several other work hold on or lean towards the wall, together with one in every of a canine mendacity on a purple floor set towards a thickly painted black floor. What’s the artist’s quandary?
Whereas trauma and ache are among the many via traces of Goodman’s work, relationship again to the early Seventies, at the least, I’ve by no means felt that she depicts herself as a sufferer. I sense within the figures’ stances or gestures — even the summary determine in “Pandemic 3” — a forlorn feeling or turning inward, however by no means a name for sympathy. The diminutive measurement of the figures means that a person’s struggling is small within the grand scheme of issues, and that to a big extent it can’t be shared or identified by others. Whereas I’ve been taking a look at Goodman’s work for a few years, it just lately occurred to me that maybe they’re about greater than trauma, which all of us have skilled in a single kind or one other. Her figures are in a state of unrelenting grief about what it means to be human and to really feel powerless about a lot that occurs to ourselves and others.
Brenda Goodman, “Quandary” (2011), oil and blended media on wooden, 72 x 72 inches (182.88 x 182.88 cm)
Brenda Goodman, “Cat’s Cradle” (2022), oil and blended media on wooden, 14 x 18 inches (35.56 x 45.72 cm)
Brenda Goodman: A Lengthy Journey: Work from 1989 to 2024 continues at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Road, Hudson, New York) via November 23. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
