Paint Isn't Just Paint at the New York Studio School

This Heat, curated by Jacob Brooks at the New York Studio School, brings together 17 works by Brenda Goodman, Steve DiBenedetto and Bendix Harms across two galleries now twice the size after recent renovations. Goodman and DiBenedetto each show seven works; Harms shows three. The exhibition runs through October 18 at 8 West 8th Street, Greenwich Village.

The pairing intrigues because it unites two longtime veterans of the New York art world with a largely unknown quantity. Goodman and DiBenedetto have each sustained a complex, nuanced dialogue between abstraction and figuration, opacity and transparency, without settling into a signature style or succumbing to pressure to be simultaneously socially relevant and self-serving — the Scylla and Charybdis few contemporary artists successfully navigate. Neither has turned their back on the world; both have addressed it with humor, imagination, and unexpected, disarming means.

Harms changes the chemistry. The numerical imbalance required constant shifts of focus — weighing what was strong in each artist individually, considering how they were and were not in conversation, then trying to set that aside to see the works on their own terms. There was something off-kilter and unscholarly about the grouping, which curating needs more of.

Harms, the exhibition brochure reveals, is a 59-year-old German artist living on a remote farm in northern Denmark, inspired by his immediate circumstances, painting directly on canvas with a palette knife. Including a non-New York artist reads as a great intervention at an institution that has often struck this viewer as insular, with pedagogy built on a narrow idea of art.

In Harms's "Tears of No Return" (2020), a flattened, layered space holds two large birds with puffed-up chests — one green, one blue — a black cat with yellow pupils and blood dripping from its mouth, and a large turquoise face, one eye visible, crying. A turquoise arm hovers protectively above the green bird, four red claw marks embedded in its chest. The comically grotesque scene conveys a world of predatory cats and defenseless birds; the man's tears underscore his inability to make harmony prevail. What is he supposed to do — punish the cat and deny its instincts?

Harms's humor inflects Goodman's work in unexpected ways. Goodman has stated her work is about "pain and sadness." Her six paintings, done between 2020 and 2026, and one intimately scaled work on paper include titles such as "Covid 3" (2021), "Covid 5" (2021) and "Not That Again" (2024). Moving between abstraction and figuration across mediums, she roots her paintings in personal experience without ever quite becoming narrative.

"Mounting Thoughts" (2024) resists decoding. Three conical shapes lie in a pile on a table tilting toward the picture plane; the brown shape behind could be the tops of one-piece chair backs; something black oozes between the forms. Across a seven-decade career, Goodman has moved between the explicit and the enigmatic without losing power. This painting falls on the side of the opaque — and its oddball absurdity grows more apparent beside Harms's weirdly cheerful, brightly colored canvases.

Many of DiBenedetto's paintings read as a weird combination of the grotesque and the comic — like an armless creature trying to apply lipstick with its nose. That humor, arising out of anger, despair and tenderness, and a commitment to exploring altered states, infuses process-driven paintings whose figural presences seem both primordial and post-apocalyptic. Like Goodman, he makes you feel you are looking at something that exists — a lifeform — but cannot name.

"Isotope Plus" (2026), the largest of his seven works in the show, fills a luminous blue ground with a flattened, multi-limbed form — the latest incarnation of his long preoccupation with octopi. The body seems turned inside out, with vacuoles of color, or eyes, dispersed across the orange and brown surface.

Seen fresh, DiBenedetto's paint reads as ectoplasm — a spiritual substance excreted by a body in a trance state. Psychical researcher Gustav Geley's description of the material as "very variable in appearance, being sometimes vaporous, sometimes a plastic paste, sometimes a bundle of fine threads, or a membrane with swellings or fringes, or a fine fabric-like tissue" echoes these paint surfaces. Paint is not just paint. That conviction connects DiBenedetto to artists as different as Alfred Jensen and Antonin Artaud, who believed art could open the viewer's consciousness to a higher order. Titles like "Lettuce Leaf Control Panel" (2026) and "Your Problem is Obvious" (2026) cast the artist as shaman trickster. That tension — serious and self-mocking, cosmic and comic — is a much-needed breath of fresh air in this narcissistic world.

Whether the newly enlarged galleries will host more such unscholarly, off-kilter groupings may determine how far the school moves beyond its insular reputation.