John Yau reviews Brenda Goodman: In a New Space continues at DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary, Bushwick, Brooklyn through October 1, 2017.

Yau writes: “Goodman renders the border between abstraction and representation meaningless. The internal sectioning of her forms invites us to categorize what we are looking at, even as they resist succumbing to that dominance. In the nearly square painting “Something to Say” (2017), the form is clearly a head in profile, facing from left to right, and it is also equally apparent that this is not what it is at all. You can read one area as hairdo and a curving black line as the jaw, but then such one-to-one matching goes haywire, and you go off the rails. This is what art can do — confront you with a mystery that speaks to the dark parts of your psyche, pull away your pretenses, and expose you to all that you try to cover over.”