Barbara Goodstein is a gifted sculptor. Since 1983, she has worked with white plaster applied to rectangular wood panels painted black, and has mastered, as she has reinvented, the genre of landscape relief. This exhibition, her seventh at Bowery, include pencil drawings, collages and plaster reliefs (all 2002-03) of cityscapes, churches, synagogues and farms, as well as the ruins of a Pennsylvania pig iron factory.

Plaster, in Goodstein’s hands, is elastic and alive; it is whispered on in certain areas, frosting-thick and roiling in others, painted over, carved and drawn into. It twists, swells and expands across and through the picture plane, opening up or doubling back on itself with Cubistic complexity. It may evoke distant clouds and hills, curving roadways and valleys, or shimmering leaves, glass, water and stone. The artist distils flora, fauna and architecture into pared-down skeletal forms that are at once childlike and spatially complex. In these shorthand landscapes, Goodstein captures and atmospheric naturalism at times reminiscent of Claude Lorrain or Corot. 

In some of the reliefs, we are stopped suddenly by elements of collage: a piece of bare wood, wire or metal that glints, wiggles or appears embedded within the relief, adds contrasting textures and spatial shifts, or brings us back abruptly to the panel’s flat surface. City Lines is a relief made using broken glass, a toothpick, a piece of wire screen, a Brillo pad, sandpaper and cloth. These varied materials retain their identities as the transcend their pedestrian nature. Zigzags become fire escapes and signage; a tubular piece of white plastic reads as neon, pipe and crescent moon. The colored shapes are tensely pressed against the black plane; their horizontality and polyphonic punch convey the anxious energy of New York City’s sparkling skyline at night.