Artist: Catherine Goodman

For more than four decades, Catherine Goodman CBE has developed a unique visual language that communicates a powerful visionary response to her lived experience and memory. In this new body of work, presented in the exhibition ‘The Colour of a Quiet Mind…,’ Goodman combines strongly pigmented oil paint, expressive brushwork, oil sticks, drips and washes to create immersive abstract paintings. At the heart of this new body of work lies an exploration of paradox: how painting can hold both quietness and turbulence. Created during a period marked by profound personal loss and illness, as well as a wider backdrop of war and political instability, the paintings reflect Goodman’s search for enduring, memorable images that acknowledge the fragility of the world while remaining open to joy, kindness and renewal.

Throughout the exhibition, Goodman draws on references from memory, such as landscapes, birds, horses and portraits, moving between the emotional terrain of her childhood in London and the realities of the present moment. Central to the exhibition is the new large-scale diptych ‘Jokerman,’ named after Bob Dylan’s song of the same title, an omnipresent and disruptive presence that emerges against quieter themes. The Jokerman embodies the unpredictability that Goodman has encountered both in life and in the studio, while the works affirm painting as a means of navigating uncertainty and finding moments of stillness within upheaval.

Ahead of the artist’s Zurich show this autumn, Goodman’s exhibition ‘In the House of Tapestries’ at Boughton House, UK, is on view from 1 August until 2 September 2026.