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Dryden Goodwin Selected Press Quotes

 

“Artist Dryden Goodwin chases an inspiring and thoroughly challenging impetus with his first foray into cinema: an exploration of four varying ways of seeing the world. The material and the immaterial of our lives, societies, and cultures are parsed through exacting voices and incisive images..”
Mubi, 2018, about Unseen: The Lives of Looking, part of 'Unusual Subjects' season on Mubi

 

“Goodwin's film 'Unseen: The Lives of Looking' uncovers complex relationships with sight, using a poetic, multi-layered approach........delivering stunning visuals alongside factual explorations of weighty subjects..”
Will Tizard, Variety, US edition, November 15, 2016, about Unseen: The Lives of Looking, in article 'Camerimage Presents Different Faces of the Documentary Genre'

 

“Fragmented, much like Goodwin’s own interpretation of identity, they are enigmatic, sumptuously-produced portraits that certainly do not provide an exhaustive amount of factual information, yet feel truer and more revealing than a biographical tome..”
Peter Yeung, Apollo Magazine, March 26, 2015, Unseen: The Lives of Looking, Queen's House, National Maritime Museum, London

 

“This visual and philosophical film, which is up for this year's DOX:Award and has already been roundly praised, looks at our primary means of understanding our environment: sight. From life-changing eye surgery and mass surveillance to cameras on Mars, British debutant Dryden Goodwin has crafted something special. ”
Mark Walker, published in The Copenhagen Post, highlighting 'Unseen: The Lives of Looking', Nov 12, 2015

 

“There is an intrinsic drive to allow the visual record of an experience made on paper to go beyond the physical barrier of the surface, and attempt to access something of its non-physical, non-visual and non-verbal essence; the feeling of the encounter or experience ”
Jack Southern, published in the Telegraph, transcript of interview from Drawing Projects published by Blackdog, Aug 18, 2011

 

“Ordinary faces look back at you from posters at London Underground stations, drawn in intense black lines, almost like forests of wiring. There is a hum of represssed energy, as if you were approaching power lines on a wasteland. There is also a solitude, a silence in the portraits that reach out, with their eyes, to you the stranger.....and then you've moved on, carried by the crowd, the connection is lost.....They're engaged, emotional, hardworking sketches.”
Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, February 8, 2010, Linear, Art on the Underground

 

“Unseen: The Lives of Looking combines live action and original soundtrack with drawing and animated intervention. It follows a poetically and visually charged journey through looking at different scales, in different forms and for different reasons. Given intimate access Goodwin charts each close encounter through his intense drawing and filmmaking activity. He considers both the physical act of looking, how we perceive the world around us and the imaginative leaps taken to comprehend what might be concealed or out of sight. .”
Wall Street International, Feb 20, 2015, Unseen: The Lives of Looking, Queen's House, National Maritime Museum, London

 

“He draws strange patterns and structures onto the peoples' faces: webs of white are scratched into the surfaces of the black and white pictures (photographs) to invent inner forms within heads, so it is as if you can see a diagram of the skull and the brain within the portrait, although it is a spiritual rather than a scientific discovery he's nudging towards. In his colour pictures, rivers of red heighten the sense that we're looking into the organic inner space of the person - he is imagining an encounter with the warm red stuff of another person's life.....Goodwin achieves something both sweetly simple and massively original. It is an explosion of the heart in the cold medium of the camera.....If you think there's no imagination, soul or talent in contemporary British art, this journey through the streets of London will make you change your mind.”
Jonathan Jones, Guardian.co.uk, October 8, 2008, Cast at the Photographers' Gallery, London

 

“It is this combination of peeping-Tom-style surveillance with a frank intimacy that makes his films so engaging. Flight, Goodwin's new film installation, follows the journey of an unseen protagonist escaping the urban jungle.”
Jessica Lack, The Guardian, January 28, 2006, Flight at the Chisenhale Gallery, London

 

“Goodwin is stimulated by an unholy appetite for unforeseen, risky encounters on his sleepless wanderings through the city. He aims at catching us off-balance, ambushing our eyes and ears - an important young talent”
Richard Cork, The Times, April 17 2002 Closer, Tate Britain, London

 

“At no point in the film is looking a simplistic exercise. The viewer too is made aware of his act of looking. Large parts of the film are devoted to indulging the viewer’s eye, drawing it towards the screen and guiding it. Simply put. Goodwin interviews the three others, but in a very specific manner. We don’t see any of their faces. Of course, we hear them talking to Goodwin, and see what they are doing. We even see the materials they are working with. But as Goodwin listens to them, he sketches their portraits, and it is here we truly see who Goodwin’s subjects are. “By offering up the whole face, I feel that the sense of discovery is lost. For me the blueprint of the film is in the way a drawing is made. You begin by sampling details and then, gradually and schematically, you suggest the whole”. Goodwin says of his methods.”
Archana Nathan, IFFR Magazine, Feb 1 2016 Unseen: The Lives of Looking, International Film Festival Rotterdam

 

“Should the politicians in Westminster look back across the Thames, they will see an animation of a child projected on to a giant video screen in front of the same St Thomas's hospital that Monet painted from. Called Breathe, the film is made up from more 1,000 pencil drawings of London artist Dryden Goodwin's five-year-old son.”
John Vidal, The Guardian, October 25 2012 Breathe, Roof of St Thomas's hospital, next to Westminster Bridge, opposite the Houses of Parliament London

 

“Goodwin fuses the handmade and the digital in a way that feels inherently personal - and more engrossing with each successive view.”
Brian Libby, Oregonian, June 25, 2007, Flight at the Feldman Gallery, Portland, USA

 

“In 2004’s Red Studies’ – portraits of friends and family – he overlays poses to create images of fluctuating intensity. Often the exquisite watercolours bracket a dawn of realisation as a look of distraction, for example, turns to one of horror”
Martin Coomer, Time Out, September, 13–20 2006,Portrait Perspectives, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

 

“’Above/Below’ by the British artist Dryden Goodwin, displayed in the Clandestine section of the Arsenale, has a haunting philosophical clarity.”
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times, June 18, 2003 Above/Below the 50th Venice Biennale, Italy

 

“Goodwin thinks like a painter, he has great fervour for grandiose paintings and his video works all strive to be great painterly epics.”
Mike Dawson, FLUX, Nov/Dec 2003 Dilate, Manchester Art Gallery

 

“Aided by an eerily layered ambient soundtrack Dryden Goodwin’s installation ‘Flight’ has a dream like quality…the drawings used in the animation reinforce the idea that something strange or other worldly has taken place.”
Helen Sumpter,Time Out, Feb 15 – 22 2006 Flight, Chisenhale Gallery, London

 

“Not many artists who approach their work with such a detailed eye still realise grand visions; Goodwin is one of the few”
www.kultureflash.net, Nov 2004, solo show at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

 

“The etchings contain a tremendous quality of loss and nostalgia. Time takes on a material presence….”
Katie Kitamura, Contemporary, issue 72 2005 State part of solo show Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

 

“Wait examines the act of looking and being looked at in public spaces, the ennui, the excitement and just the everydayness of spectatorship. The work succeeds because Goodwin is able to exploit the potential for theatre contained in the act of looking, because the viewer begins to devise narratives, seeking to enter the lives of the artist's subjects.”
Gayatri Sinha, The Hindu, Sep 16, 2005, Wait shown as part of Cross Town Traffic, Apeejay Media Gallery, India

 

“The portrait and cityscape prints in the back room were superb, multiple perspectives had been etched onto the same plate, showing up as penumbrae of varying densities. ”
Martin Herbert, Artforum, Nov 28, 2004, State part of solo show at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

 

“The beautiful ceiling vault and the black and white floor tiles are used to great effect in the visual composition of the work.  This architectural setting adds formal rigour to a highly emotive piece exploring the connections between aesthetic and religious experience.”
Simon Wallis, The Burlington Magazine, Sept 2003 Above/Below the 50th Venice Biennale, Italy

 

The installation that really got people talking was Dryden Goodwin’s remarkable ‘Within’…a haunting achievement”
Jonathan Romney, The Guardian, October 17 1998, Within part of the Pandemonium Festival, LUX gallery, London