Apr 172025
 

Aaron Gilbert‘s paintings for World Without End, currently on view at Gladstone Gallery combine aspects of dense urban environments with a sensitive look at the people who make their lives there.

From the gallery-

Known for his paintings that probe the distance between individuals and their communities, the private and the public, and the real and the conjured, Gilbert imagines the personal narratives that quietly unfold in the corners of our shared societal structures. Guided by myth, an uncanny sense of timelessness, and the artist’s deep interest in storytelling, these emotionally tender tableaux examine how individuals maintain their humanity in a historical moment punctuated by crisis, the looming peril of systemic collapse, and the increasingly totalizing velocity of consumer-driven desires.

While Gilbert’s subjects are often locked in moments of intimate exchange—we might see a couple in a bathroom together, a parent holding their child, an elderly man gazing wearily from a hospital bed—these interactions are nearly always mediated by the literal and symbolic confinement that typifies contemporary urban life. Referencing the containers that define city spaces (including storefronts, apartments, and even our own bodies), Gilbert investigates the complex emotional theater that plays out within all interiorities.

Typically inspired by moments from his own personal life, brief glimpses of interactions he’s observed between strangers, or an amalgamation of both, Gilbert’s work is particularly focused on endowing his subjects with the agency to circumvent the power structures that dictate their lives. Often including windows, plastic sheeting, glass, and other transparent barricades, Gilbert’s paintings probe the invisible mechanisms that quarantine us from one another. Exploring the limitations of even the most familiar of relationships, the artist imagines his subjects subverting the nearly inexorable systems of social taxonomy that have been instituted to organize and control our mutual understanding of desire, love, and community.

Gilbert’s paintings are often illuminated by the familiar glow of neon logos, halogen bulbs, or the hot orange tinge of summer sunsets oxymoronically improved by pollution. With his use of light and details that indicate a world touched by magical realism, the artist quietly suggests that his figures’ personal interactions extend beyond their relationship to goods, social frameworks, and the world as we know it. Amplifying the strange portals that join surrealism to reality, Gilbert allows us to glimpse a world hidden beneath the prosaic veneer of our organizing principles.

The artist has cited sources including devotional retablos, George Tooker, and Diego Rivera as influences, and his own work suggests a philosophical conflation of all three. Addressing both the dehumanizing qualities of contemporary life as well as the significance of the individual, Gilbert often looks at the myths generated by consumerism as an entry point to addressing cultural crisis. Interrogating the illusion of a choice-based identity offered under the mantle of capitalism, the artist frequently incorporates corporate logos in his work, including the Adidas and AT&T symbols that appear throughout this exhibition. Looming large in his dreamscapes, these familiar emblems seem to function as 21st century replacements for the mystical hieroglyphics of another time, their vacuum of meaning highlighting contemporary culture’s attachment to totems stripped of all spiritual significance. Juxtaposing intimate narratives with the dystopic depersonalization generated by commodity fetishism, Gilbert’s fictions search for the moments of magical connection that occur both on our city blocks, and behind other people’s walls.

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

Apr 172025
 

Currently on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is the Thomas Scheibitz exhibition Argos Eyes. The show includes paintings, sculptures, and in the upstairs gallery, a table of tools and objects related to the work.

From the press release-

Internationally renowned for his mastery of painting, Scheibitz subverts traditional notions of the medium with radical juxtapositions of color and a unique formal language that lands ambiguously between abstraction and representation. Drawing from classical painting and architecture, the contemporary urban landscape, and popular culture, Scheibitz deconstructs and recombines signs, images, shapes, and architectural fragments in ways that challenge expected contexts and interpretations.

Scheibitz’s practice has been at the center of contemporary artmaking since the late 1990s with early solo exhibitions at the ICA London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, as well as breakthrough presentations at the German pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennial, MUDAM Luxembourg, Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and more recent major shows at Kunstmuseum Bonn, MMK Frankfurt, and Pablo Picasso x Thomas Scheibitz at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin.

In an age of infinite images and visual information, Argos, the multi-eyed, all-seeing guardian giant of Greek mythology, serves as a kind of avatar for Scheibitz. Like the panopticon-esque figure, the artist’s painting and sculpture absorb and dissolve visual material, encoding and decoding, mapping, measuring, penetrating and exploring a pictorial inventory. For Scheibitz, Argos Eyes are the observers of events and circumstances; that which we see directly, or indirectly via our ubiquitous technological devices, lenses, and screens. For the artist, a picture has always been a summary of different sources of observations and experiences which remain in the mind’s eye like “double exposures”. The eye, or by proxy the lens, is the entrance to the conscious or unconscious processing of what we see or do not see. A fundamental question for the artist remains the philosophical question: do we only see what we already know?

In the main ground floor gallery, Scheibitz presents a dynamic range of painterly compositions and a sculpture. Bringing together selections from his vast lexicon of images, Scheibitz builds up these compositions meticulously yet intuitively, using maquettes, drawings, collage, photography, and sketches. Recognizable forms such as eyes, cubes, droplets, and pyramids are translated into multilayered and complex pictorial structures that urge the viewer to consider multiple perspectives.

In the upstairs galleries, more intimately scaled paintings encircle the room, in addition to an Atlas-like master table filled with models, stencils, and other tools representative of the repeated motifs found in the artist’s studio. This conceptual landscape illustrates the core nature of the work, offering interrelated exercises in form, color, and material.

This exhibition closes 4/18/25.

Apr 162025
 

The images above are of two sections of Laura Owens’s immersive multi-media exhibition on view in two of Matthew Marks locations. It’s a lot to take in with so many details in the layered paintings and throughout the various rooms.

Walking through a door to the brightly colored green of the second room gives the feeling of entering a magical secret world, an impression that continues throughout the galleries. Adding to this is a humorous video tucked away in a tiny space behind another door, and small panels that open from the walls revealing additional paintings.  In the other gallery location are more rooms, including one with boxes containing various items and handmade books. It’s an overwhelming but wonderful show best seen in person.

From the gallery-

Laura Owens began exhibiting her work in the mid-1990s and quickly became known for her innovative approach to painting. Her work synthesizes traditional methods with unconventional ones, including printmaking and digital manipulation, to create destabilizing illusions of depth, extending her paintings beyond the confines of the canvas into three-dimensional space. Her paintings are often self-referential and draw extensively from art history, decorative arts, and craft traditions, as well as mass media and personal anecdotes.

The exhibition demonstrates Owens’s both meticulous and experimental approach to artmaking. Each element is hand-made in the artist’s studio through labor-intensive processes pioneered by Owens. A single panel may have over one hundred fifty layers of hand-printed silkscreen, on top of which Owens then paints further. The exhibition also includes kinetic elements, moving pieces within the artworks that continually point to their spatial and temporal contexts. “Though Owens is a master of composition, and the dynamism of her works has much to do with her sophisticated resolution of the problems that occur within the picture plane, it is at the edges, relations to external aspects such as architecture, interior space, landscape, time, geography, subject matter, style, and discipline, that their restlessness is found,” Kirsty Bell has written. “There is always more room to be surprised.”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

Apr 162025
 

“Night”, 2014, Oil on canvas

“Ocean Ladies”, 1988, Oil on canvas

“Untitled”, 1964, Oil on canvas

Currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery is Good Things and Bad Things, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and objects by the late Suellen Rocca. The collection highlights the artist’s use of a variety of styles throughout her career to express similar themes.

From the gallery-

Suellen Rocca’s work is marked by dream-like ambient landscapes filled with pictograms arranged in loose grids. She drew inspiration from various types of “picture writing,” such as ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, advertisements, and children’s activity books. Fantastical, witty, and deeply personal, Rocca’s unique visual language comprises a collection of images from her life, including 1950s dollhouse furniture, jewelers’ catalogs, bodily sensations, and the work of artists such as Marc Chagall and Max Beckmann. Rocca combined these symbols in eccentric compositions. As one critic observed, “Rocca offers up mysterious mystical visions for contemplation.”

The exhibition, whose title, Good Things and Bad Things, is borrowed from one of Rocca’s paintings, includes two large-scale paintings made in 1964. In one painting, palm trees, shoes, and gold rings with gemstones emerge from a turquoise ground. Another painting presents repeating images of Santa Claus, dancing couples, and winter landscapes. Later canvases envision interior worlds in electrifying fields of vibrant color.

Purses were also an important motif for Rocca, which she first developed from images in a 1940s manual on how to crochet purses. For Rocca, they were examples of “the cultural icons of beauty and romance expressed by the media that promised happiness to young women of that generation.” In the late 1960s, Rocca expanded this imagery to sculpture and began painting on purses. Describing Rocca’s sculpture Purse Curse (1968), Dan Nadel has written, “it reminds me of a world of images that did not have double meanings, and of the fantasy of love, pure and simple. But the purse also conceals. What’s inside?”

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

Apr 162025
 

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

“Sí y No”, 1990, Acrylic and collage on canvas (detail)

Luhring Augustine and kurimanzutto are currently showing paintings by the late Mexican artist Julio Galán in both of their galleries. The captivating paintings are filled with symbolic imagery and reflect the artist’s struggles with identity.

From kurimanzutto-

Galán’s brilliant career, which spanned from the mid-1980s until his untimely death in 2006, was primarily centered in New York City, Paris, and Monterrey, Mexico. While his work has not been broadly exhibited outside of his native country since his passing, his work was exhibited internationally extensively during his life, and he is widely considered the preeminent Mexican painter of his generation. Galán’s nonconformist and expansive multidisciplinary practice addresses issues of identity, gender, culture, and social constructs in works that layer self-representation and aspects of the personal with larger themes of cultural and sexual difference. Infused with an allegorical quality and woven throughout with a complex array of signifiers—enigmatic iconography and cultural references—his works, as well as his carefully crafted public persona, embraced a self-conscious othering and an ambiguous mutability that refused fixed interpretation. As art historian and professor Teresa Eckmann writes, “On canvas, he recounted and constructed illogical visions, teasing out the line between the real and artifice, his artwork deemed an “inaccessible yet formally intoxicating fabrication of self.” Galán hid from the viewer his artwork’s content as much as he revealed it; simultaneously, with his body, he explored fluid identity through masquerade.”

Rendered in a pastiche of styles, with a syncretic approach to culture, Galán’s work blends references and influences from Mexican folk and religious imagery to Surrealism, Pop Art, and graffiti. While he has often been associated with the Neomexicanismo movement of his native country and the Neo-expressionism of his peers in New York, these were characterizations he resisted, much in the way that he deliberately rejected any form of restrictive definition or singular interpretation. Magalí Arriola, former director of Museo Tamayo and curator of Galán’s most recent major retrospective, notes, “Though in some of his work [he] resorted to an iconography associated with popular Mexican culture…the use of stereotypical figures such as the charro of the Tehuana, was also related to his interest in transvestism and disguises as strategies to subvert sexual identities and other cultural constructs.” Galán’s approach exposes the limitations and issues inherent in the interrelated sentiments and systems that create and uphold any form of binary classification or fixed characterization, be they related to sexuality, nationality, spirituality, or any categorization. As writer Evan Moffitt notes, “Galán’s adoption of Mexican stereotypes and Platonic personalities reveals nationalism to be a kind of pompous drag…. There’s plenty of kitsch in Galán’s paintings, to be sure, but that kitsch is fundamental to their radicalism.” Continuing to resonate today are the remarkable energy, intelligence, and theatricality of Galán’s work, and the questions he explored regarding the relationship of individual identity and the creation of the self to oversignified notions of culture and nationalism.

For more detail on Galán, kurimanzutto has provided a link to an excellent essay by Evan Moffit about the artist and his work.

This exhibition closes 4/19/25.

Apr 152025
 

Artist and illustrator Joseph Christian Leyendecker created this painting in 1926 for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Leyendecker produced annual covers featuring timely takes on “Baby New Year” for several years.

This work was part of Delaware Art Museum’s 2024 exhibition Jazz Age Illustration, which focused on the art of popular illustration in the United States between 1919 and 1942.

Apr 112025
 

For Facsimile, currently on view at Yancey Richardson, Sharon Core has reproduced Flowers, the famous 1980 book of photographs by photographer Irving Penn. Instead of using photographs, however, she has recreated the images by painting them using Epson printer inks and photo paper. These paintings were then photographed to create replicas of the book. The work investigates issues of memory, reproduction, and the authorship of images, while also creating works that are beautiful objects in themselves.

From the gallery-

Through the meticulous recreation of historical still-life paintings, along with more recent artworks rendered through the medium of photography, her work explores the tension between reality and its photographic representation. In Facsimile, Core expands these themes by subverting her usual process. Rather than reproducing painted still-lifes through photography, she has instead turned to Irving Penn’s iconic Flowers series—a masterful collection of photographic still-lifes—and reinterpreted them through painting. This ambitious project both deepens and reframes Core’s exploration of the still-life genre by posing questions not only about photography in the digital age, but about material specificity and the status of the reproduction as well.

At the center of Facsimile is a hand-made reproduction of Penn’s 1980 book Flowers, which originated from a commission for Vogue magazine for its annual Christmas edition in 1967. Each year from 1967 to 1973, Penn focused on a different flower—beginning with tulips and moving on to poppies, peonies, roses and other blooms—capturing their ephemeral beauty in various states of perfection and decay. In 1980, these images were compiled into the popular and widely available book Flowers, published by Harmony Books, now out of print. Core’s Facsimile: “Irving Penn, Flowers” resurrects and reimagines the book as a tactile, meticulously handcrafted object that visitors are invited to handle. Alongside this edition, Core presents a selection of her 73 hand-painted recreations of Penn’s photographs, displayed throughout the gallery to offer a closer look at her reinterpretations of the original works. Rather than a departure, we might see this as a return for Core, who originally trained as a painter. The interplay between painting and photography has always been central to her practice and Facsimile brings this dialogue into sharper focus.

Core’s process for Facsimile is as intricate as it is conceptually layered. Each of Penn’s photographs is recreated as a painting using Epson UltraChrome inks on Canson Photo Rag paper, materials typically associated with digital photographic printing. Through this method, Core subverts the intended use of contemporary materials, transforming them into tools for painting. She then photographed her painted pages, designed a layout replicating that of the original book and bound the final prints into an edition of seven. In Core’s words, “the book is a multiple sculpture or a three-dimensional print that must be handled and touched to experience. My name is nowhere in the ‘book,’ therefore it is not an artist book, per se, but in fact a converted replica or facsimile.” By humanizing and rarifying a mass-produced object, Core’s “three-dimensional print” calls for a different kind of attention from the viewer. It cannot be experienced via a screen and must instead be encountered physically. In this generous gesture, the now out-of-print book is given a new lease on life, taking on a different meaning through a complex process of conversion: transforming photographs into paintings, which are then re-photographed, printed and bound into a book.

Visually, Facsimile diverges from Penn’s original photographs through Core’s expressive, painterly approach. Unlike her earlier series, in which she precisely reproduced certain still-life paintings in three-dimensions and photographed the results, effectively posing questions about the boundaries between illusion and reality, here Core seeks to emphasize the handcrafted nature of all photographs. As she notes, “Ever more so, the photograph is manipulated and collaged and is printed not through time and light, as in analog process, but with a fluid medium on paper. It becomes a machine assisted drawing or painting.” In Facsimile, Core makes explicit the artistry behind the work: the hand-lettered text is visibly imperfect and the images, while faithful to Penn’s compositions, are imbued with the texture and fluidity of the artist’s brushwork. Even the colors in the paintings result from a rigorous process of mixing and diluting the digital hues of cyan, yellow, magenta and black.

There is no trompe l’oeil effect at play here, nor any photorealist painting technique either and the result is therefore not an exact replica but a layered gesture that urges us to reflect on the evolving nature of representation in the digital age. By moving from a mechanical form of reproduction to an analogue process, while using a medium of mass production, Core questions the role of materiality in image-making. This finely crafted body of work seems to slip between painting, photography and sculpture, casting new light on Penn’s original photographs and book, while posing deeper questions about image-making technologies and their supposed ties to representing reality in this post-truth era.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

Apr 112025
 

“King Alfred’s Country”, 2006. Acrylic on linen

“Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater”, 2005. Acrylic on canvas

“Dibirdibi Country”, 2006. Acrylic on canvas

“Dibirdibi Country”, 2010. Acrylic on linen

The expressive paintings pictured above, currently on view at Karma, are by the late Aboriginal Australian artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori who began painting in 2005, at eighty-one years old. Learning that her paintings are focused on the land she was forcibly relocated from adds an extra layer of poignancy to the work.

From the gallery-

The Kaiadilt artist’s original, nonrepresentational iconography, based on interlocking shapes, passages of pure color, and visible brushstrokes, depicts her primary subject, Bentinck Island, in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, using the language of abstraction. Gestural marks trace the path of rivers; milky white forms indicate the incursion of cyclones; diagrammatic structures map the patterns left on the ocean floor by dugong grazing on seagrass. Rendered from memories of a home she was forced to leave, Gabori’s paintings are, in her words, “about a story place way out to sea.”

Gabori began painting in 2005 around the age of eighty-one. While she started small, working horizontally on a tabletop, the artist soon began using wall-mounted surfaces as large as nineteen-feet wide, moving her body across her compositions as she applied acrylic straight out of the tube and mixed wet on wet directly on her canvases. The resulting paintings, which she made in the last decade of her life, often focused on six significant locations, or Countries, as the Kaiadilt refer to them, on Bentinck: Mirdidingki, Dibirdibi, Dingkari, Makarrki, Thundi, and Nyinyilki. To make these works, Gabori drew on recollections of the island’s topography: its saltpans, reefs, and mangrove swamps; the freshwater pond where she collected waterlilies; the various rivers that run alongside where she, her father, and her husband were born. In 1948, Gabori and the rest of Bentinck’s population were forcibly relocated by Christian missionaries to the nearby Mornington Island. There, parents were separated from their children and the Kaiadilt people were forbidden from speaking their language. Gabori spent the rest of her life on Mornington, only able to visit Bentinck temporarily after the passage of Australian laws that restored Kaiadilt access to the land in 1994.

Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater (2005), one of the earliest works in this exhibition, visualizes Dibirdibi Country, the area of Bentinck associated with her husband Pat through the Kaiadilt system of naming people after places, as well as the Rock Cod, a being that, according to Kaiadilt cosmology, created the island. Concentric, ovoid rings of unmixed color radiate out from a central mass like the ripples of freshwater that flow into the island’s estuaries. The nearly neon Dingkarri (2006) associatively maps the contours of an islet that was an important fishing ground for the Kaiadilt community. Rather than a literal depiction of the Country’s appearance, Dingkarri is instead a pictorial manifestation of tides in flux: by mixing acrylics on the canvas itself, Gabori created morphing color fields that suggest movement.

Though developed autonomously from Western art history, Gabori’s painterly syntax nonetheless evokes the oeuvres of the American Abstract Expressionists. Evidence of Gabori’s hand is everywhere in My Country (2009), which celebrates Mirdidingki, her birthplace. Working rapidly, she brushed together magenta and white to create a variegated field that morphs as it stretches across the vertical canvas. Close looking reveals a subterranean wash of yellow acrylic peeking through from behind Gabori’s urgent brushstrokes, complicating what at first appears duochromatic. Her jagged, brushy edges and embrace of unadulterated black call to mind Clyfford Still; her arcing, interlocking forms provoke comparison with Amy Sillman. The gestural Didirbidi Country (2010) reads as an exploration of the relations between shapes that abut each other, creating craggy borderlands at their intersections. Beyond its formalism, the work is a recollection of the stone fishing trap walls maintained by Kaiadilt women that branch off of Bentinck’s coastline. In addition to specific cultural meanings and associations encoded in paint, the works convey an affective charge that transcends geography, temporality, and identity.  Refracted through memory and mediated by dispossession, Gabori’s paintings are a living archive of a homeland.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

 

Apr 102025
 

For Camille Henrot’s imaginative installation for A Number of Things at Hauser & Wirth, a variety of sculptures, including several from her Abacus series, are surrounded by paintings from her Dos and Don’ts series. There’s a playfulness to both, but something a bit darker too. Walking on the soft floor among the sculptures there is a feeling of childlike wonder, while at the same time, in combination with the paintings, you are reminded of the rules and restrictions that are imposed on us, starting when we are very young, and how they become more oppressive with age.

From the gallery’s press release-

Evoking children’s developmental tools, shoes, distorted graphs and counting devices, new large-scale bronze sculptures from the artist’s ‘Abacus’ series (2024)—presented alongside recent smaller-scaled works—address the friction between a nascent sense of imagination and society’s systems of signs. The exhibition will also feature vibrant new paintings from Henrot’s ongoing ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series.

Initiated in 2021, the ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series combines printing, painting and collage techniques where etiquette books become the palimpsest for play with color, gesture, texture and trompe l’oeil. The artworks will emerge from a flooring intervention—conceived and designed with Charlap Hyman & Herrero—that transforms the gallery into a site of sensory experimentation. Henrot’s exhibition vivaciously sets the stage for the arbitrary nature of human behavior to circulate freely between rule and exception.

As viewers enter the gallery, they will be greeted by a pack of dog sculptures tied to a pole, as if left unattended by their walker. Shaped from steel wool, aluminum sheets, carved wood, wax, chain and other unexpected materials, Henrot’s creatures speak to the ever-unfolding effects of human design and domestication. As an extension of Henrot’s ongoing interest in relationships of dependency, the dogs stand in as the ultimate image of attachment.

Henrot’s latest ‘Abacus’ sculptures unite the utilitarianism of the ancient calculating tool with the arches and spirals of a children’s bead maze—a toy popularized in the 1980s as a heuristic diversion in pediatric waiting rooms and nursery schools. Through these formal associations, an instinctive sense of play collides with the learned impulse to search out patterns and impose order. With their biomorphic contours, opaline patinas and quadruped or biped anatomies, these works seem charged with a lifeforce of their own. Hovering between pure abstraction and their multivalent referents, Henrot’s bronzes invite our unfettered, sensuous engagement, even as they allude to the symbolic systems that tyrannize our imaginations.

Behavioral conditioning is a central concern of Henrot’s ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series. These richly layered paintings consider the idea of ‘etiquette’ as it relates to society at large: its codes of conduct, laws and notions of authority, civility and conformity. The works feature collaged fragments of invoices from an embryology lab; a note conjugating the German verb ‘to be;’ dental X-rays; digital error messages; children’s school homework; and to-do lists, among other things. Together, they build on Henrot’s interest in making sense of the urge to organize and categorize information—a theme that has been prevalent in her practice since her groundbreaking film ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013). The ‘Dos and Don’ts’ series distorts its source material to reveal the constructed, performative nature of any social identity, while acknowledging the emotional security that behavioral mimicry and groupthink can provide.

As the exhibition’s almost childlike title suggests, ‘A Number of Things’ brings together a disparate but related group of works that collectively address the enormously difficult task that is living, learning and growing in society. With tenderness for the most banal traces of our existences, Henrot offers a meditation on the competing impulses to both integrate and resist the unquestioned structures of society in our everyday lives.

‘There’s a reason why, in English, the word ‘politics,’ ‘polite’ and ‘police’ all sound the same—they are all derived from the Greek word polis or city, the Latin equivalent is civitas, which also gives us ‘civility,’ ‘civic’ and a certain modern understanding of ‘civilization.’

—David Graeber, ‘The Dawn of Everything’ (2021)

In the video walkthrough with Henrot (below) she discusses many of the inspirations for the work.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.

Apr 102025
 

“Pahari Picnic”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Abe”, 2024, Oil on linen

“Lago”, 2024, Oil on linen

The paintings in Catherine Goodman‘s Silent Music, her current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, are filled with energetic brushstrokes and bright colors have the eye moving all around the canvas. Although abstract, it’s the hint of recognizable forms that encourage a more contemplative look.

From the gallery-

Opening in January, ‘Catherine Goodman. Silent Music’ presents a series of new, large-scale paintings by the British artist, where her characteristically expressive brushwork yields animated surfaces that pulse with the dynamic energy of their making. For Goodman, the studio is a place of spiritual meditation. Each painting represents an act of intimate transmutation—a way for her to turn closely held memories and personal vulnerabilities into newfound stability.

As the artist trustee at the National Gallery in London, Goodman has spent hours drawing from the collection and has developed a particular affinity for Old Master paintings, which she describes as her ‘only real teacher.’ Inspired by the intensity and drama of Renaissance masterworks by artists such as Titian and Veronese, and influenced by the poignantly psychological work of such groups as the London School, Goodman’s highly personal paintings transcend her individual experience, opening outward and inviting us in.

For decades Goodman has maintained a daily practice of drawing from observation. Through this she has constructed charged pathways between the physical world she observes and her own inner landscape. In these most recent abstractions, she often begins from landscapes and portraits that hold meaning for her. She then obscures these figurative grounds, building up evocative and densely layered compositions that invite sustained attention. ‘Lago’ (2024), a whirlwind of crimson, cobalt and lush green is one of many works named for a meaningful location or loved one whose spirit they embody. Other compositions, like the exuberant ‘Pahari Picnic’ (2024) or ‘Echo’ (2024)—monumental in scale and bursting with energy—give form to poignant memories. The substantial physical presence of these paintings, with their thick impasto and richly layered pigments, materialize intangible impressions of moments, places and people alike, as well as the psychological terrain encountered during the creative process itself. As the artist has confided to writer Jennifer Higgie, her artmaking ‘was never about problem solving. It’s about releasing something.’

Though rooted in the personal, Goodman’s oeurve uses the intimate act of painting to address the expansive macrocosm of collective experience. Her paintings act as a form of silent communication, resonating beyond the written or spoken word. Persistently forward-looking, Goodman’s latest body of work continues her tireless pursuit of art’s unique capacity to nurture connection.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.