Neil Goodman at Klein Art Works

Neil Goodman wants to build the Savannah Center Sculpture Garden on the campus of Indiana University Northwest in Gary, where he teaches. He plans to make nine bronze castings up to 8 feet tall, which will be installed singly or in groups among the buildings. With much of the project already funded, Goodman has finished four full-sized fiberglass maquettes. Klein Art Works recently exhibited the maquettes along with nine smaller bronzes, the tallest of which is 3 1/2 feet high. Emphatically linear, the works are open, repeating forms that respond to the industrial landscape of northern Indiana, an area he drives through daily to reach Gary from his Chicago home.

Although Goodman could make his sculptures much faster in steel, he laboriously casts his carved wax forms in bronze. Surface irregularities and traces of the artist's hand add character to the works, and bronze, with its art-historical weight, seems ageless. His heroes are Giacometti and Brancusi.

Unlike Goodman's table-size bronzes from the 1990s, which suggest objects in still lifes, such as tools, fish and animal heads, the smaller sculptures in this show do not have a primary viewing point. The artist challenges his audience by playing with three-dimensional space. The large fiberglass works here also have multiple viewing points. They change when we pass by them, just as industrial structures can seem to assume different shapes when seen from a moving vehicle. One large work consists of two knobby V-shaped elements joined at the ends like a shark jaw. Another piece, a large circle with several chunky notches, suggests a gearlike mechanism. There are also towerlike rectangles, and diamond shapes that recall ventilators on building roofs. The large-scale pieces are placed at ground level. We instinctively measure them against our bodies. Dark and slightly larger than human size, they convey a threatening presence that charges the space around them.

The Savannah Center Sculpture Garden project comes at a major turning point in Goodman's career--as he moves from gallery to landscape, from indoors to out. His work shifted significantly when he won a competition to create an out-door sculpture in Midland, Mich. The brass gatelike work he made was scaled to the landscape and open, so that viewers could see the surrounding grass and trees.

--Victor M. Cassidy

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