For more than a decade now, artists have been working in a cultural ecosystem where the installation arrives with a position paper and the canvas moonlights as a placard; sometimes it’s hard to remember that “art for art’s sake” was ever a thing. Whatever the merits of the many worthy causes art has lately been drafted to serve (and they are real), Neil Goodman’s recent solo show at Zolla Lieberman Gallery, “Rivers and Valleys,” arrives like fresh air in a stuffy room, a welcome reminder that culture can still traffic in beauty, craft and spirit without chasing the latest social controversy.

Goodman’s elegant, atavistic bronzes reflect this Chicago artist’s lifelong devotion to the artisanal, workmanlike side of artmaking. Cast bronze, with its long pedigree as tool, weapon, religious artifact, and decorative and ceremonial object, remains at the core of his practice.

        At the same time, the work extends two formal perceptual projects he continues to relentlessly pursue: sculpture as both object/figure and as frame/landscape. The exhibition contains referential multitudes and represents a remarkably coherent body of work in form, methodology, and material. It’s as if the entire history of bronze sculpture has been digested and re-combined into this roomful of bronze artworks—as indeed they have.

        This is the artist’s first Chicago solo exhibition since he traded the Great Lakes for the Pacific, and the relocation appears to have cost him none of his Midwestern preoccupations—though the California light and terrain have clearly crept in at the edges. The bronzes are, in fact, bicoastal by birth: Goodman shapes the models from multi-density fiberboard in his western studio, then ships them to Illinois to be cast, fused and finished into richly patinaed, lightly pocked surfaces. (Those skins arrive with a pedigree of their own, tipping a respectful hat to the early modernism of Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and their circle.)

        Sixteen modestly sized, wall-mounted pieces (plus 3 freestanding pieces on pedestals) make up Allure, and feature bilateral symmetry often found in nature. (Goodman views the series as a clear departure from earlier work, though they are certainly recognizably his.) Strongly frontal and vertical, each iconic artwork is characterized by a blade-like overall shape pierced by an elongated void. Female figures unavoidably come to mind, their intrinsic sensuality attenuated into formalized shapes reminiscent of tools or weapons. These hermetic, singular objects are suspended or secured to the wall with bespoke triangular mounts. Refined yet sexy, the pieces range across the wall in configurations that could be hieroglyphs or lines of musical notation.

        Other freestanding sculptures in the exhibition, such as Swivel, Wheat and Twilight, remain strongly vertical but revert to a three-part taxonomy, which the artist compares to three-figure compositional arrangements in art history such as Canova’s Three Graces and Giacometti’s 3 Men Walking. Goodman notes of these artworks, “I feel in some respects that although this body of work certainly has a historical context, this sculpture belongs to me just as Giacometti belongs to him.”

        With a small group of cast bronze trapezoids (Cleft, Crevice, Gorge) Goodman transitions from his exploration of sculpture as figure to sculpture as frame. The horizontally composed sheets of bronze undulate slightly to allow them to stand and are pierced with soft rectangles, the interplay of the two shapes forming its own pleasurable rhythm. The sculpture becomes a portal, unassuming yet insistent, through which we perceive the constantly changing world beyond. Thus, the artist has used the same device—outer shape pierced by inner void—to address both figure and frame.

        In the end, “Rivers and Valleys” makes its case the old-fashioned way: by being made and made well. Goodman remains a craftsman in a medium that has served as tool, weapon, relic and ornament for a few thousand years, and he seems comfortable with the company. The questions that have occupied him for an entire career—sculpture as figure and as portal—are still very much open, and he works them over with the patience of a man who has no intention of closing the file. In an era of art that insists on telling us what to think, it is a pleasure to spend time with work content simply to be looked at and looked through.

K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.