Artist: Neil Goodman
Year: 2012
Dates: b. 1953, Hammon, IN
Materials: Bronze
Dimensions: 9′ x 20′ x7″

About Neil Goodman

Neil Goodman casts shapes in bronze and welds them into pedestal pieces or presents them on the wall or floor in formal compositions. His semi-abstract forms suggest tools, fish, fruits, long bones, animal heads, and classical busts. Dense, but visually light, they are surprisingly heavy when handled. The forms look old and we never see the artist’s hand in them despite their rich colors and surfaces. His wall and floor pieces are mostly square or rectangular, and his sculptural assemblies may incorporate as many as 90 forms. Goodman constantly creates new shapes, retires old ones, and changes scale, so he guesses that his overall vocabulary of forms is “probably several hundred.” Goodman calls Giacometti “my great love… who makes sculpture that invigorates the space,” and the influence that took him from pottery, which he discovered in college, to sculpture, something he could do “without following the script.”