The Offering
Artist
Brenda Goodman
(American, born 1943)
Date1983
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions46 × 56 in. (116.8 × 142.2 cm)
Frame Size: 47 3/8 × 57 3/8 in. (120.3 × 145.7 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineGift of Linda Dunne, 2008
Object numberUAC3059
DescriptionTwo strange figures face each other in a stark, neutral interior, not unlike a modern apartment. Behind them, a huge picture window looks onto a tranquil vista: fields of barely-there pastel hues, featureless save for a few indistinct trees and a pale blue hill in the distance. The whole scene is washed in a hazy, rosy sunrise/sunset light. On the left, a dark, vaguely human shape, like a prehistoric totem, its “head” speckled with what might be tiny eyes, seems to kneel in supplication before its companion. The off-white figure on the right, with two bulbous lobes at its top but tapering to a pair of legs at the bottom, seems to regard the other entity with a single, large red eye. It extends a thin arm toward the dark figure, and holds in its hand … a necktie (a clip-on, apparently, or more likely an iconic representation of a necktie), decorated with a yin/yang pattern that echoes the dark/light, small/large, multi-eyed/single-eyed (male/female?) duality of the pair themselves. Is this “offering” meant to acknowledge their complementary differences? Who gives the gift and who receives? (The smaller figure at least has the vestige of a neck to tie it around.) This pale, heart-like shape had appeared in Goodman’s paintings before, as a stand-in for the artist herself, just one of a system of symbols for people and emotional states that Goodman began developing during her time in the Cass Corridor; they allowed her to express, among other things, her anxieties over moving from Detroit to New York in 1976, in her show at the Willis Gallery that same year._____
Native Detroiter Brenda Goodman was born in 1943. She studied at Wayne State, but she got her degree from the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies). There she received rigorous formal training, and honed her craft by copying both Old Master and Modern painters. Goodman turned the skills she acquired to exploring her own emotional and psychological state. Her work over the years has always included both abstract and narrative or autobiographical elements, existing somewhere between abstract expressionism and a kind of surrealism. She has taught and lectured around the country, and participated in numerous exhibitions. “My intent is to extend the parameters of my specific and personal issues to reveal and comment on basic universal emotions and conditions,” read her artist statement for a 2007 solo show at the Brooklyn Museum, which featured a series of starkly honest and revealing self-portraits of a woman then in her early 60s. “My work is about reality, not irony.”
Text by Sean Bieri
Collections
