CATHERINE GOODMAN

Goodman joins a distinguished lineage of modern and contemporary artists who have expanded their practices through printmaking at ULAE. Among them, Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler stand out in particular as kindred spirits—artists who, like Goodman, were devoted passionately to daily drawing and guided by instinct. At ULAE, Goodman immersed herself in the unpredictable process of painting on and printing from copper plates. Working intuitively, she built up highly expressive, densely layered compositions, often laying down a black or grey calligraphic mark as starting point. Goodman sometimes carried works in progress home in the evening to adjust with an oil stick, forging an unorthodox dialogue between mediums.

‘Almost everyone I knew in the world was asleep because of the time difference to London, so I spent the evenings alone, drawing into the prints that hadn’t worked out for me that day. It was an extraordinarily intense time navigating my inner landscape, having an opportunity to review my life back home. It seems a time of innocence now.’

Goodman has long centered her practice on portraiture. Religious icons from her childhood left an early mark, and she often mentions seeing portraits even within her abstractions. This oscillation between figuration and abstraction—a constant in ‘The ULAE Series’—relies in part on the artist’s longstanding daily drawing practice, which she cites as the initial means of harnessing her sources of inspiration, which range from natural phenomena to film. One work on view in the exhibition depicts the titular boy from Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie ‘Ivan’s Childhood,’ gazing through a telescope, a dramatic yet intimate image.

Each work, Goodman writes, whether figurative or abstract, is ‘layered with those memories of my time there, the light, urgency and sense of isolation—being cut off from the mainland of our lives while exploring the inner landscape.’