“I explore the contest between light and dark, power and grace, grit and tenderness.”
Boxers + Ballerinas, John Goodman’s first solo exhibition in New York, pairs pictures from the artist’s acclaimed monograph, The Times Square Gym (Introduction by Pete Hamill, Evan Publishing, New York, 1997), with a 2004 commissioned backstage photo essay of the dancers of the Boston Ballet.
No greater contrast in purpose exists in human locomotion. Goodman avoids the brutal confrontation of boxers in the ring but rather wisely creates a character of The Times Square Gym itself, a legendary New York institution where boxing greats and unknowns worked out side by side. Now defunct, (the offices of Condé Nast would rise from its ashes) the gym was managed by the tireless and compassionate Jimmy Glenn who rode it through twenty years of daily training regimens. Goodman photographed the gym during the last 18 months of its life. He treats the exterior like a portrait. Its grimy New York-worn concrete skin seems to bear the bruises and battered cheeks of its occupants. It is the face of Job, while the gym’s interior circulates crusaders throughout its halls and on its mats like blood, pumping and giving it life.
The dancers Goodman photographed exude their own contradictions. At once corporeal and otherworldly, they share in the sweat and exertion of the fighters and sometimes they too appear like warriors in battle. Mostly, however, their expected grace in motility is conveyed in the gritty and graphic manner of Goodman’s monochrome printing. These ballerinas are magical – as all ballerinas should be – formed by the photographer’s eye and his belief that angels can’t be photographed but their halos can.
EXHIBITION
Boxers + Ballerinas
by John Goodman
From April 3th to May 31st, 2014
Rick Wester Fine Art
526 West 26th Street
Suite 417
New York, NY 10001
USA
+1 (212) 255-5560
