CATHERINE GOODMAN
For her inaugural solo exhibition in Hauser & Wirth, Catherine Goodman will present a new series of monumental abstract paintings, marking a significant progression in the artist’s visual language.
February 27 – March 5, 2024
Goodman’s characteristically animated surfaces and energetic brushstrokes have long been signatures of her expressionistic landscape paintings, portraits and sketches. Now, as she moves into abstraction, the distinctive vitality of her art takes on a new, immersive power. Saturated in color and monumental in scale, Goodman’s newest paintings remain imbued with a longstanding connection to memory, place and the unconscious, that has shaped her art for many years.
Central to Goodman’s artistic process is the act of drawing directly from life, a practice she has maintained every day for decades. This unwavering commitment to drawing underpins a deeply intuitive mode of artmaking that combines her outward physical observations with sensations pulled from her inner imagination and memories of specific places or experiences.
Often working across multiple canvases at once, Goodman sees her painting practice as a means of inhabiting the moment. As such it holds a uniquely restorative potential where the imagination can process and renew itself. The substantial physical presence of her paintings, with their thick impasto, materialize the psychological depths and complexities encountered in the process of their making.
Goodman finds inspiration in the work of such 20th-century filmmakers as Tarkovsky, Bergman, Wenders and Erice, as well as Renaissance master painters like Titian and Veronese, often incorporating their creations as subjects in her observational drawings.
For decades, Goodman has maintained a regular practice of drawing from films, pausing a film for six minutes and completing drawings using ink, pastels and watercolor. The resulting sketches inform the imagery and mark-making of her paintings, including her new abstract canvases on view in the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth.
A maelstrom of vivid red, blue, orange and green, ‘Night Beekeeper II’ expresses and distills Goodman’s observations while navigating nature on dark winter evenings, contemplating both the beauty of nature and the perils facing our ecosystem. Consistently translating such experiential insights, Goodman manifests in her paintings the delicate balance between outward expression and intense introspection.