Brenda Goodman: Self-Portraits

Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is pleased to present Self-Portraits, a solo exhibition of paintings by Brenda Goodman on view in the back gallery January 11 through February 19, 2022.

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.