A portrait of Catherine Goodman between monotype and painting, from late nights at ULAE to her return to the London studio
This November, the prestigious art gallery Hauser & Wirth presents the first exhibition dedicated to the prints of British artist Catherine Goodman. I have been following her work for many years and I wanted to create a portrait of her.
“The ULAE Series” was born from her 2024 residency at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island: it is her first major exploration of printmaking as an autonomous language and an important expansion of her visual vocabulary. Catherine wrote that “much of the new language that was evolving in the prints followed me home to my studio in London and was translated into paint.” This cross-pollination between media – monotype and painting – is also evident in the new painting that emerged from that period, shown alongside the prints.
With this body of work, Goodman joins a significant tradition of artists who have expanded their practice through printmaking at ULAE. I think of Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler, whom I feel as kindred spirits to Goodman: all three are deeply connected to daily drawing and to a gesture guided more by instinct than calculation.
At ULAE, Catherine immersed herself in the unpredictable process of painting on and printing from copper plates. Working intuitively, she created dense, layered compositions, often beginning from a black or grey calligraphic mark. She sometimes took prints home in the evening to rework them with oil stick, creating an unusual dialogue between media: the print returning to drawing, and drawing reopening the print.
I am also struck by the intimate side of this experience. Because of the time difference, almost everyone she knew in London was asleep while she spent her evenings alone “drawing into” the prints that hadn’t convinced her during the day. It was an extraordinarily intense period, a chance to explore her inner landscape and review her life back home.
For me, as someone who often works on the relationship between image, memory and politics, following Catherine Goodman’s research is essential: her ability to transform a printmaking residency into an existential journey is a powerful reminder of what drawing and print can still say about our present.
