Barbara Goodstein at Bowery - New York - Brief Article

Barbara Goodstein is a gifted sculptor. Since 1983 she has worked with white plaster applied to rectangular forest panels painted black, and has mastered, as she has reinvented, the genre of landscape relief. This exhibition, her seventh at Bowery, included pencil drawings, collages and plaster reliefs (all 2002-03) of cityscapes, churches, synagogues and farms, as well as the ruins of a Pennsylvania pig iron factory.

Plaster, in Goodstein's hands, is elastic and alive; it is whispered upon in certain areas, frosting-thick and roiling in others, painted above carved and drawn into. It twists, swells and expands across and end the picture plane, opening up or doubling back upon itself with Cubistic complexity. It may call up distant clouds and hills, curving roadways and valleys, or shimmering leaves, glass, water and stone. The artist distills flora, fauna and architecture into pared-down skeletal forms that are at one time childlike and spatially complex. In these shorthand landscapes, Goodstein captures an atmospheric naturalism at times reminiscent of Claude Lorraine or Corot.

In a certain number of of the reliefs, we are stopped pop by elements of collage: a piece of bare thicket wire or metal that glints, wiggles or appears embedded within the relief, adds contrasting wefts and spatial shifts, or brings us back abruptly to the panel's flat surface. City Lines is a relief made using shivered glass, a toothpick, a piece of wire shield a Brillo pad, sandpaper and woven fabric These varied materials retain their identities as they transcend their pedestrian nature. Zigzags become fire escapes and signage; a tubular piece of white plastic reads as neon pipe and new moon moon. The colored shapes are tensely crushed against the black plane; their horizontality and polyphonic bore convey the anxious energy of fresh York City's sparkling skyline at night.

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