HUDSON, New York — Brenda Goodman is 81 years old and has been the subject of solo exhibitions since 1973. Her art is impossible to characterize. She has never developed a signature style, nor aligned herself with abstraction or figuration. I have reviewed eight of her shows and recently visited her studio in the Catskills, yet there is still more to see and say about her work. For this reason, I traveled to Hudson to see A Long Journey: Paintings from 1989 to 2024 at Pamela Salisbury Gallery.
I think Goodman’s refusal to fit in and make seductive paintings has long been held against her, particularly in New York. Between 1994 and 2011, she painted a series of large, harrowing, psychologically driven self-portraits in which she seemed to have peeled away all decorum to reveal figures possessed by ravenous, feral desire, as they crammed gobs of paint, signifying food, into their mouths. This was the artist’s interpretation of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” (1820–23). In contrast to Goya, Goodman never identified what her figures were madly consuming. As much as these portraits were about her, they were also about us.
According to my online search, neither the Whitney Museum of American Art nor the Museum of Modern Art has anything by Goodman in their collections. Is it because New York institutions cannot deal with an artist who is so direct in her rawness, preferring instead cool surfaces and ironic gestures?
In 2015, I flew to Detroit to see a large survey of Goodman’s paintings and drawings at the College for Creative Studies (CCS), organized by Michelle Perron, along with a survey of her works on paper at Paul Kotula Projects, in a nearby Michigan suburb. The CCS show included work dating from the early 1960s, when she was a student at the school (then called the School of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts). These exhibitions provided an extensive view of a complex artist whose paintings have never looked like anyone else’s.
The 21 paintings in the current exhibition run the gamut from representational views to abstractions, including combinations of figural and abstract elements, and biomorphic and geometric abstractions. There are paintings that resist any reading, invite symbolic readings, and combine the legible with the illegible. Despite all the diversity, Goodman’s artworks are unmistakable in their capacity to disturb, even when they are abstract.
Take “Find It – It’s Yours” (2021), a largely gray and black painting with a cluster of irregular geometric shapes in different colors in the upper left-hand corner above a block of solid gray. A tangle of black lines fills the central area of the picture plane. Before Goodman started this painting, she incised the wood surface, leaving a tracery of cuts the paint only partially covers. The interplay between the scarred surface and the network of black lines is just one of the many collisions we find in her work.
One of Goodman’s great paintings of her studio, “Studio 3” (2023), depicts a large pinkish-red painting on an easel set against a multi-hued, pastel wall of composed horizontal streaks and rivulets of paint. Two paintings lean against the wall, one atop the other, on the left side, while a vertical grid painting hangs on the wall to the right. The triangular form filling the easel painting reminded this viewer, at least, of a witch’s hat. What both disrupts and elevates the image is the thickly painted, coal black form abutting the easel painting. While everything else in the work is legible, this is not.
Another great studio painting is “Quandary” (2011). In a large dirty white room, we see the artist looking back over her shoulder. Has our presence interrupted her? A color chart and several paintings hang on or lean against the wall, including one of a dog lying on a red surface set against a thickly painted black ground. What is the artist’s quandary?
While trauma and pain are among the through lines of Goodman’s paintings, dating back to the early 1970s, at least, I have never felt that she depicts herself as a victim. I sense in the figures’ stances or gestures — even the abstract figure in “Pandemic 3” — a forlorn feeling or turning inward, but never a call for sympathy. The diminutive size of the figures suggests that an individual’s suffering is small in the grand scheme of things, and that to a large extent it cannot be shared or known by others. While I have been looking at Goodman’s paintings for many years, it recently occurred to me that perhaps they are about more than trauma, which all of us have experienced in one form or another. Her figures are in a state of unrelenting grief about what it means to be human and to feel powerless about so much that happens to ourselves and others.
Brenda Goodman: A Long Journey: Paintings from 1989 to 2024 continues at Pamela Salisbury Gallery (362 1/2 Warren Street, Hudson, New York) through November 23. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
