…Going through the New York galleries in the months when Barney and Dia:Beacon stole most of the attention, I found artists who are willing to grapple with the messy dialectic involved in realizing an idea, and they included Scott Brodie and Barbara Goodstein.

…Goodstein works from nature, but her interest in the Northeastern landscape, with its rolling hills and old stone barns and nineteenth-century churches, is expressed indirectly, through the sometimes giddily abstract counterpoint of white plaster lines that she inscribes on black plywood surfaces. The power of Goodstein’s work is in the multiplying angles from which she approaches naturalistic experience, sometimes suggesting a spatial richness that harks back to Courbet sometimes dissolving found architecture into Constructivist play. I have followed her work with enthusiasm for years, and I thought this one of her best shows, in which the real and the abstract became partners in the dynamism and the dissonance of an endlessly fascinating duet.

By the standards of Dia:Beacon, which measures achievement in cubic yards, neither Goodstein nor Brodie is ambitious. But their ambition is of an entirely different order, and it has to do with a personal feeling for craft, a feeling that creates a gathering sense of trust between the artist and the viewer. I know this because when I look at their work I experience the effects of such trust. I sense an imaginative expansiveness when I regard some of Goodstein’s pieces…