Catherine Goodman Exhibition

Catherine Goodman Exhibition

Marlborough (Midtown)

This event has ended.

The Directors of Marlborough Gallery present an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the British artist Catherine Goodman.

This exhibition of Catherine Goodman’s new works draws its title from the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Thematic strands woven throughout include the sense of the inherent vulnerability of the human condition, existential challenges both physical and moral, as well as the notion of communion with what might be called the familiar. The complementary threads of the artist’s memory and imagination are gathered in her effervescing landscapes, which are populated with symbolic, solitary figures, and occasionally accompanied by barely discernible semblances of creature-like forms.

For Goodman, working from imagination is grounded in the daily practice of drawing from her direct observation of people and her own habitats. Recurring motifs in Goodman’s paintings are the interpretations of her own subtle mythologies. The emblems of each thematically connected work are approached with renewed curiosity - her subjects, while familiar, retain a kind of untamed vibration.

For many years Goodman has returned to the landscapes which appear frequently in her work. The tranquil Tuscan countryside or the untamed Indian groves and mountains are regular haunts, rich with memories and impressions that bind the narratives of her subjects.
Goodman’s highly energetic painterly language is as evident in her drawings as the works on canvas. Often the physical expression of the human body in paint shares formal characteristics with the landscape in which it sits, so much so that body and surroundings are almost indivisible.
In the painting titled Loic, the titular sitter, a disabled resident in permanent care, is depicted in an abstracted Indian landscape—a place that the artist has visited for thirty years. In her own words, Loic is a “profoundly disabled” man who has been placed in an extraordinary and remote setting that he may never see. Yet Loic looms monolithically, as though expanding beyond his constraints, and in this way Goodman effects his liberation.
The Girls, three sisters shown in a state of contented preoccupation, portrays a positive resourcefulness that belies the naivety and innocence of childhood - a time when action is driven by instinct and curiosity.

Several works in the exhibition are guided by spiritual references and laden with symbolic meaning. Goodman’s paintings can point towards unanswerable questions relating to the search for self-knowledge and the power of shame as a form of judgement. In a similar vein, the artist’s longstanding practice of drawing from the great masters has nourished her reworking of a sensual fragment of Titian’s painting Diana and Actaeon, commanding the viewer’s gaze directly to the delicate abandon of nakedness and desire, displayed by the bathing Diana and her attending nymph. While both paintings are plainly titled—Diana and Dark Diana—the artist has summed up the works in the phrase, “shame is the cloth we clothe ourselves in.”

Catherine Goodman (b. 1961) lives and works in the UK, between her London and Somerset studios. Goodman trained at London’s Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts and the Royal Academy Schools, winning the RA Gold Medal in 1987. In 2002 she won First Prize in the prestigious BP Portrait Award at London’s National Portrait Gallery, for her painting of Anthony Sutch. As part of the winning prize, the Gallery commissioned Goodman’s portrait of Dame Cicely Saunders. Following Goodman’s solo exhibition, Portraits from Life at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014, the Gallery acquired her portrait of film director Stephen Frears for its 20th century collection.
Goodman is also the Artistic Director of the independent, not-for-profit Royal Drawing School which she co- founded with HRH The Prince of Wales in 2000.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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