Jacob Brooks has brought three painters together at the New York Studio School, and the pairing feels strange on purpose. This Heat pairs veteran artists Brenda Goodman and Steve DiBenedetto with Bendix Harms, a German painter who lives on a remote Danish farm. The exhibition runs across two galleries, now twice the size after recent renovations.
A Curator’s Odd Choice
Brooks is the curator, and the show’s announcement caught attention because it paired two longtime New York figures with someone the audience had never heard of. The question the reviewer asks is simple: what connects these three?
The answer is not obvious. Goodman and DiBenedetto have spent decades exploring abstraction and figuration, opacity and transparency, without settling into a single recognizable style. They have not turned their backs on the world; they have addressed it through humor and imagination. Harms brings a different approach.
The Numbers Behind the Show
The exhibition includes 17 works. Three belong to Harms, with the remaining 14 split evenly between Goodman and DiBenedetto. That means Harms gets less than one-third of the space, which forced the reviewer to keep switching focus between the three artists.
“Together, Harms’s work consisted of less than one-third of the exhibition.”
The imbalance was not a problem. It created a challenge, pushing the viewer out of comfort zones.
Harms From Denmark
After the show, the reviewer sat in the school’s reception area and read the brochure Brooks wrote. Harms is inspired by his immediate circumstances and paints directly on canvas using a palette knife. He is a 59-year-old German artist living on a remote farm in northern Denmark.
Having a non-New York artist was a great intervention. The studio school has often struck the reviewer as an insular atmosphere with a narrow idea about art.
Tears of No Return
Harms’s work includes “Tears of No Return” (2020), a flattened, layered space occupied by two large birds, a black cat with yellow pupils and lines of blood, and a large turquoise face with one eye crying. The comically grotesque view shows the violence of a world where cats hunt birds. The man’s tears emphasize his inability to ensure harmony.
Goodman’s Sad Paintings
Goodman has said her work is about “pain and sadness.” Her six paintings, done between 2020 and 2026, include titles such as “Covid 3” (2021), “Covid 5” (2021), and “Not That Again” (2024). She moves between abstraction and figuration, across different mediums, but never quite becomes narrative.
The reviewer kept returning to “Mounting Thoughts” (2024), a painting where three conical shapes lie in a pile on a table that tilts up toward the picture plane. The brown shape on the left could be the tops of chair backs, and the room looks gloomy. The grayish-white cones suggest mounting thoughts, while black oozes out of the spaces between the forms.
Goodman has worked for seven decades, moving back and forth between the explicit and the enigmatic without losing power. “Mounting Thoughts” falls on the side of the opaque.
DiBenedetto’s Grotesque Figures
DiBenedetto’s paintings mix the grotesque and the comic. Many look like an armless creature trying to apply lipstick with its nose. That humor arises out of anger, despair, and tenderness, marked by a commitment to exploring altered states.
The reviewer has been looking at DiBenedetto’s work for a long time. It never occurred to them before that the paint could be seen as an ectoplasm, a spiritual substance or energy excreted by a body in a trance state.
Psychical researcher Gustav Geley described such material as “very variable in appearance, being sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic paste, sometimes a bundle of fine threads, or a membrane with swellings or fringes, or a…”
A Dialogue Worth Keeping
The show’s grouping was off-kilter and unscholarly, which the reviewer saw as a strength. Curating needs more of that.
The dialogue between the three artists is complex and nuanced. Neither Goodman nor DiBenedetto has succumbed to the pressures to be simultaneously socially relevant and self-serving, our current Scylla and Charybdis that few contemporary artists have successfully navigated. Harms adds to that conversation, even at less than one-third of the space.
The reviewer decided that comparing the work was a dead end. Instead, they looked at each artist for themselves.
Key Facts Box
– Exhibition: This Heat at the New York Studio School
– Curator: Jacob Brooks
– Artists: Brenda Goodman, Steve DiBenedetto, Bendix Harms
– Works: 17 total (3 by Harms, 7 by each other artist)
– Harms’s share: Less than one-third of the exhibition
– Harms’s age: 59
– Harms’s location: Remote farm in northern Denmark
– Goodman’s titles: “Covid 3” (2021), “Covid 5” (2021), “Not That Again” (2024)
– DiBenedetto’s largest work: “Isotope Plus” (2026)
Source material: “Paint Isn’t Just Paint at the New York Studio School,” Hyperallergic.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.