Brenda Goodman “Self-Portraits”

Sikkema, Jenkins & Co

poster for Brenda Goodman “Self-Portraits”

This event has ended.

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. presents Self-Portraits, a solo exhibition of paintings by Brenda Goodman. The show marks Goodman’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Across a career spanning over 50 years, Goodman has relentlessly explored the physical and psychological limits of painting, freely moving between abstraction and figuration. She began in 1960s Detroit, as a member of the famed Cass Corridor Movement. After moving to New York City in 1976, Goodman further developed methods of representing intensely personal issues through her work. Throughout the years, she earned a reputation as a painter’s painter, recognized for using paint in inventive ways, from very thick impasto to thin veils of color, while employing a variety of traditional and unorthodox tools and methods.

This solo exhibition presents a survey of Goodman’s self-portraits, mostly created in the early 2000s, with the earliest — the artist’s first-ever self-portrait — dating back to 1974. Often referenced by herself and others in press reviews and other writings, this show will be the inaugural presentation of these works as a group in New York. Considered “one of the most powerful and disturbing achievements of portraiture in modern art” by critic John Yau, Goodman’s self-portraits depict herself in full-body, nude and standing alone in her own studio. Her pale, stark figure is rendered diminutive by the surrounding shelves of colorful canvases and looming walls. In some, Goodman faces the viewer, gripping a bundle of paintbrushes in her hands; in others, she is turned to the side or fully around, showing only her back. The bare vulnerability of these self-portraits is evoked by both the physical nakedness of her body and a sense of unveiled interiority. Amongst her paintings, the mask lifted from her face, Goodman reveals the portrait of her self-representation and the intimate surety of her identity as an artist.

Brenda Goodman was born in 1943, in Detroit, Michigan. She received her BFA from the College of Creative Studies, from which she also received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 2017. In 2015, a 50-year retrospective was presented at the Center for Creative Studies and Paul Kotula Projects. That same year, her work was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual invitational, where she received the Award in Art.

Recent solo exhibitions were presented at Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Zephyr and Maize (virtual); The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; David & Schweitzer Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY; and Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY. Goodman’s work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; the Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; and Birmingham Museum of Art, AL. Her work was included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial, and she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Media

Schedule

from January 11, 2022 to February 12, 2022

Artist(s)

Brenda Goodman

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