“My work is not preconceived but is more akin to the improvisations of jazz. The painting develops through a series of intuitive choices guided by an understanding of formal issues and my years of experience,” says Brenda Goodman in reference to her process. Spanning a career of over 50 years, Brenda Goodman has relentlessly explored the physical and psycho- logical limits of abstraction and figuration. Regarded as a “painter’s painter” for her inventive handling of paint, Goodman’s paintings range from thick impasto to thin veils of color, creat- ing deeply interior spaces of personal confrontation and reflection.
A member of the famed Cass Corridor Movement, Goodman has been the subject of over forty solo shows, and was represented in the 1979 Whitney Biennial. In 2015, a fifty-year retrospective of her work was presented at the Center for Creative Studies and at 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. In 2019, Goodman was inducted into the National Academy of Design. Goodman’s work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contem- porary Art, Chicago; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; and the Agnes Gund Collection. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York.