South Gallery
September 4 - October 17, 2026
IGOR & MARINA
The Shadow Lives Where There is Light
Zolla/Lieberman Gallery is pleased to present Rivers & Valleys, a solo exhibition of sculpture by Neil Goodman. Bringing together recent works in bronze, the exhibition reflects both a continuation and an evolution of Goodman’s decades-long exploration of line, mass, void, material, and space.
After nearly forty years in Chicago, Goodman relocated to Los Alamos on California’s Central Coast, exchanging the industrial landscapes of Chicago’s South Side and Gary, Indiana, for rolling hills, agricultural valleys, and oceanfront cliffs. Rivers & Valleys emerges from this transition, absorbing the rhythms of a new landscape into an abstract sculptural language developed over the course of his career.
Central to Goodman’s practice is bronze, a material whose history includes ancient vessels, classical statuary, monuments, tools, and objects of ritual. As art historian Sue Taylor notes in her accompanying essay, Goodman’s relationship to bronze is also deeply physical, rooted in the resistance of the material and the processes of making. His sculptures align themselves with an “age-old, workmanlike, artisanal tradition,” while remaining unmistakably contemporary in their abstraction.
Throughout Rivers & Valleys, Goodman continues to investigate the relationship between presence and absence. Mass is stretched and reduced. Openings and intervals become as consequential as the bronze surrounding them. As Goodman states, “emptiness becomes its own kind of substance,” an equal partner in the composition. His forms move between the organic and geometric, the architectural and figurative, inviting associations without settling into representation.
To Goodman, the landscape is not represented so much as internalized. His sculptures occupy a territory between solidity and emptiness, nature and geometry. The exhibition considers how place and the passage of time can reshape an artist’s visual language while preserving the ideas and sensibilities that have sustained a lifetime of making.
After nearly forty years in Chicago, Goodman relocated to Los Alamos on California’s Central Coast, exchanging the industrial landscapes of Chicago’s South Side and Gary, Indiana, for rolling hills, agricultural valleys, and oceanfront cliffs. Rivers & Valleys emerges from this transition, absorbing the rhythms of a new landscape into an abstract sculptural language developed over the course of his career.
Central to Goodman’s practice is bronze, a material whose history includes ancient vessels, classical statuary, monuments, tools, and objects of ritual. As art historian Sue Taylor notes in her accompanying essay, Goodman’s relationship to bronze is also deeply physical, rooted in the resistance of the material and the processes of making. His sculptures align themselves with an “age-old, workmanlike, artisanal tradition,” while remaining unmistakably contemporary in their abstraction.
Throughout Rivers & Valleys, Goodman continues to investigate the relationship between presence and absence. Mass is stretched and reduced. Openings and intervals become as consequential as the bronze surrounding them. As Goodman states, “emptiness becomes its own kind of substance,” an equal partner in the composition. His forms move between the organic and geometric, the architectural and figurative, inviting associations without settling into representation.
To Goodman, the landscape is not represented so much as internalized. His sculptures occupy a territory between solidity and emptiness, nature and geometry. The exhibition considers how place and the passage of time can reshape an artist’s visual language while preserving the ideas and sensibilities that have sustained a lifetime of making.
