Adventure II 1963

Robert Goodnough made this painting, Adventure II, with oil on canvas. It’s a flurry of shapes, colliding, separating, maybe even dancing? The process feels so visible here, like you're seeing the painting being made in real time. I love the physicality of it, the way the colors push against each other. There’s a real material presence, like he’s sculpting with paint. Take that big grey shape, top left: it’s almost like a cloud, but it's been cut out and placed there deliberately. The paint isn't super thick, but you can still see the brushstrokes, the way he layered the colors to create depth and movement. Goodnough was playing with ideas that were also present in the work of the earlier cubist Juan Gris, there's a similar dialogue between abstraction and representation, which keeps us guessing and looking. This openness to interpretation is what makes art so exciting, right?