Paint Isn’t Just Paint at the New York Studio School

I went to This Heat at the New York Studio School, curated by Jacob Brooks and spread across two galleries now twice the size after recent renovations, to see the works of Brenda Goodman and Steve DiBenedetto, and learn about those of Bendix Harms. I have followed and written about the first two for many years; I knew nothing about the last. 

I was intrigued by the exhibition announcement because it paired two longtime veterans of the New York art world with someone unknown to me. Was there a formal connection between these artists, and what was it? I have long felt there was a complex and nuanced dialogue within contemporary art about the relationship between abstraction and figuration, opacity and transparency, as seen in Goodman and DiBenedetto's work. I also believe that neither has settled into a signature style nor succumbed to the pressures to be simultaneously socially relevant and self-serving, our current Scylla and Charybdis that few contemporary artists have successfully navigated. They have not turned their back on the world; they have addressed it in unexpected and disarming ways, with humor and imagination. How would Harms’s work add to this dialogue, and did it have to? There was something off-kilter and unscholarly about this grouping, which we need more of in curating. 

There are 17 works in the exhibition. Three are by Harms, with the remaining 14 evenly divided between Goodman and DiBenedetto. This imbalance required this viewer, at least, to keep changing my focus to see what was strong about each artist individually, to consider the ways they were and were not in conversation with each other, and to try and downplay this consideration to see the works for themselves. This presented an unexpected but not unwelcome challenge, pushing me out of my comfort zone.

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