To quote the critic Margaret Hawkins on Goodman’s recent exhibition at “Perimeter” gallery in Chicago, “If much abstract sculpture seems somehow loosely rooted in organic forms, Goodman’s does not. His objects look like physical manifestations of mathematical principals, equations somehow made dimensional and wrought in metal. For all their weight and bulk, they have an airy purity about them, like music. To walk among them is a little like listening to a Bach Fugue.
At the same time, the work seems industrial. It looks like some distilled version of the generic city, Chicago or Gary, a kind of elegant junk heap where the skeletal remains of machines outlive their usefulness in dumps and empty lots. These currents in Goodman’s work might seem dissonant, the musical and mathematical at odds with the industrial and thrown away. What is interesting is how he brings them together, implying connections between the inherent structure of how things are designed and what’s left of that structure after its use is exhausted”.
Goodman’s sculpture has been commissioned and collected by museums, corporations, convention centers, parks, synagogues, universities, and private residences. In the Chicago area, three of Goodman’s most visible public projects include a monumental wall relief at the Chicago McCormick Place South Pavilion, a permanent large-scale bronze installation at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and a free standing sculpture at the Burnham Park Children’s Garden at Soldier’s Field Stadium. In 2006 Goodman completed his largest outdoor project to date. Commissioned by Indiana University Northwest the work entitled “Shadows & Echoes,” includes ten large scale cast bronze sculptures in a co-designed landscape situated at the heart of the campus at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Indiana.
Goodman received his MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 1979. Since then, Goodman’s has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally, and has had numerous one-person exhibitions throughout the country. Goodman’s sculpture was included in the 1995 Museum of Contemporary Art’s opening exhibition entitled the “History of Chicago Art 1945-1995.” His work has been written about and reviewed in numerous catalogs and periodical’s including “Art Forum,” “Art in America,” “Art News” and “Sculpture Magazine.
