The next Artist You Need To Know is Brenda Goodman.
Goodman is an American artist based in Pine Hill, New York, who is primarily known for her paintings but also works in collage and sculpture.
The critic John Yau offers that “…Goodman had absorbed lessons from Surrealism, Expressionism, and Symbolism, as well as from Hieronymus Bosch, [previously featured Artist You Need To Know] James Ensor, Alfred Kubin, and Goya” and that her self-portraits are “one of the most powerful and disturbing achievements of portraiture in modern art.”
Born in Detroit, in 1943, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts (1965) from the College for Creative Studies in the same city. In 2017, Goodman obtained an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the College for Creative Studies.
For a decade (1965 to 1975, when she relocated to New York City) Goodman was part of the Cass Corridor Movement : these were artists from Detroit’s Cass Corridor neighborhood, and their artwork and ideas were focused upon the post industrial wastelands that were becoming prevalent in areas of Detroit, as well as around Michigan and the rest of the United States. Critic Caroline Goldstein has praised Goodman’s work of this period. Goldstein’s words : “as one of the few women associated with the movement, Goodman’s work is especially notable.”
From Artsy : “Painter Brenda Goodman has worked at the intersection of figuration and abstraction for more than 50 years. Renowned for her inventive use of unorthodox tools and paint applications, she has shown alongside [previously featured Artist You Need To Know] Philip Guston and Jack Tworkov early in her career, and went on to participate in the 1979 Whitney Biennial. Goodman employs a range of painting techniques in her work —pouring, scraping, scrubbing, and sanding —to create ruggedly textured surfaces that give her colorful panels a sculptural quality. Her abstract, organic shapes recall the human body, while her figurative self-portraits contain seductive, otherworldly forms within them.”
Goodman’s work has been exhibited in many spaces, including The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
A more extensive listing of Goodman’s exhibitions and accomplishments can be seen here.
She is represented in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art (NYC), The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The California Center for the Arts Museum, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Agnes Gund Foundation, Cranbrook Art Museum, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Museum of Contemporary Arts in Chicago, The First National Bank of Chicago, The American Medical Association Headquarters, and The Rutgers-Camden Collection of Art.
More about her life and career – and many more images of her artwork – can be enjoyed here.