DeWitt Cheng, San Francisco art critic (Artwork, ArtLtd., Artillery, East Bay Express, VisualArtSource, TheDemocracyChain, SquareCylinder) and curator (Stanford Art Spaces, Peninsula Art Museum)

ANNETTE GOODFRIEND: PHENOTYPE
2026

In 1956, the British novelist and scientist C.P. Snow wrote “The Two Cultures,” an article asserting that contemporary culture was divided into competing and incompatible scientific and humanist views of life, and that as a result, contemporary British elites, still given classical educations, were scientifically unprepared for the modern world. The idea garnered notoriety when the article was expanded into a 1959 book, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which in the opinion of some readers pitted scientific rationalists—facts and numbers nerds, bereft of imagination—against touchy-feely poetic types—endowed with little common sense and less math—at the mercy of unpredictable lightning-strike insights and inspirations.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once joked that there are two types of people: those who divide the
world into two types of people, and those who don’t. While the “two cultures” schema
had its uses, especially during the Cold War, when Americans, scared of Sputnik,
worried about losing the “sciencing” (to use Matt Damon’s marooned-astronaut slang
term from The Martian) race. Simplistic intellectual models, however, should not be
mistaken for reality, which is both more complex and interesting. Many artists have had
strong interests in science, and many scientists have pursued the arts; we should
consider progress in both spheres as friendly competition or parallel evolution, rather
than a war of essences between, say, the right- and the left-brained tribes, logic versus
creativity. Ann C. Thresher argues in The Tangle of Science:  Reliability Beyond
Method, Rigor, and Objectivity, that science is shaped by the quirks, intuitions, and even
obsessions of scientists, and that the ideal of the Sherlockian or robotic thinking
machine is only an abstraction. False dichotomies and extreme partisanship only divide
and lobotomize us.

One contemporary artist who synthesizes her scientific background and her creative
drive is the Bay Area sculptor Annette Goodfriend, who crafts enthralling and eccentric
models of human anatomical parts. These are not the perfect, idealized muscles and
organs depicted in doctors’-office models, but ghostly-white, rough-textured specimens
that suggest fine-art antecedents including the life-sized plaster and marble figures of
the pop artist George Segal and the Bay Area Figurative Movement sculptor Manuel Neri, respectively; the theatrical Surrealist assemblages and tragic, eroded Existentialist figure sculptures of Alberto Giacometti; and the anatomical-dissection tradition begun by Leonardo and Andreas Vesalius, continuing through the academic tradition which Goodfriend humorously and poetically subverts. Enthusiasts of the contemporary sculpture of Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith will recognize in Goodfriend a kindred spirit who confronts the anatomical uncertainties of the human condition—liquid and squishy, and prone to getting out of whack—with elegant wit.
 
Goodfriend’s Phenotype sculptures reflect her dual studies in science and art, with her study of Genetics at UC Berkeley—inspired by her brother’s tragic early death at age nineteen from Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy—followed by a Masters of Fine Art degree from California College of the Arts. A little clarification of terms is required here. A genotype is the genetic inheritance or blueprint of an individual, subject to mutation or
molecular change if the gene sequence is altered or deleted;  a phenotype is the visible,
discernible expression of that genotype, as it has been affected by the influences of the
environment. Goodfriend’s spectral phenotypes are thus partial portraits of individuals
affected by both molecular change and by the world into which they are born.

The photographer Diane Arbus spoke of her fascination with what impolite, pre-woke
audiences of the 1960s and 1970s called “freaks,” with empathy and, we surmise, self-
identification: “There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who
stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading
they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve
already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.” It may be going too far to see
Goodfriend’s anatomical; sculptures as portraits, exactly, and certainly not as freaks, but
as survivors of a kind, portrayed without condescension, with acceptance tinged with
humor about the human condition shared by ‘normies' and ‘aristos’ alike.

The Phenotype series comprises sculptures primarily made in 2025, but includes a few earlier works conceptually similar. Fabricated from silicone rubber, epoxy, hydrocal plaster, acrylic and encaustic paint over aluminum wire armatures, the white pieces, mounted atop black painted backgrounds, resemble scientific oddities, or fossils, or gelled ecotplasm. The work is presented as biological specimens, with humorous Latin binomial titles that the artist, unburdened by British public-school Latin, has researched. (The Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen also uses pseudo-scientific terminology for his wind-powered robot-centipede Strandbeest beach beasts.) Let’s examine Goodfriend’s curiously engaging bestiary.

“Crura Nodus” (Noodle Legs), “Crura Spinosa” (Pricker Feet), and “Crura Helix” (DNA
Legs) feature boneless, unarticulated legs hanging in various configurations ending
with realistic human feet cast from the artist’s, recalling Tim Hawkinson’s latex rubber castings of his naked body. Six sculptures are permutations of ribs and vertebrae. “Tickle” shapes the rib cage into an oval form that suggests the veins of a leaf, or the skeleton of a trilobite of pill bug. “Knot,” “Sine Spine,” and “Spina Pavimentum”  twist their spinal, snake-like forms into uncomfortably distorted  configurations, while “Scoliosis” reminds us of Shakespeare’s exaggeratedly evil hunchback, Richard III, “deformed, unfinished, … scarce half made up,” a worthy Plantagenet foil to his Tudor successors. “Pulmonis Lichen” and “Pulmonis Lepidoptera” take the form of lungs and windpipe, with the branching alveoli of the former bedecked with lichen and the closed air sacs of the latter ornamented with butterfly wings. “Tongue Ball” is, as its title suggests, a sphere composed of radial tongue forms, waggling as if propelling themselves like Radiolaria or other marine protozoans, with their soft skins defended by spiky plant stamens. “Squid Fingers” and “Hug” juxtapose anatomical metaphors of fingers and forearms with loopy noodles of silicone rubber and stacks of cast hydrocal, respectively. “Uterus” imposes human features—lower face, ears, hands, feet—onto the symmetrical antler form of Fallopian tubes—as if the baby’s parts had conjoined without the right templates, and assembled themselves in innocent ignorance. Anyone familiar with the neurological model of the sensory homunculus (little man), a puppet-like figure with exaggeratedly large lips, tongue, and especially hands, attached to spindly limbs, will recognize the logical, sensible distortion.

Annette Goodfriend refutes the popular but misguided notion of the incompatibility of the scientific and the artistic provided by Snow almost a century ago, and revived, given a gendered spin, in Leonard Shlain’s engaging 1998 book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. As the hemispheres held in our skulls collaborate and complement each other, there is a conversation, a back-and-forth, right-and-left neurologic exchange in serious aesthetic creativity, resulting in a rich synthesis of ideas: a synchronicity of expression. Goodfriend achieves such reconciliation with elegant juxtapositions of poetic realism and expressive manipulation.




Annette Goodfriend: Surreal Biology of the Body

By
Betty Ann Brown, PhD

The human body is the best work of art.
~Jess C. Scott 

Annette Goodfriend creates strange, evocative sculptures of
human body parts. She distorts hands and legs, lungs and tongues, to
create objects that are undeniably beautiful--but also insistently weird
and creepy. She stacks body parts like funerary discards, then multiplies
and expands them like fragments of monochromatic nightmares. The
surreal tension between aesthetic appeal and physical repulsion gives
her works a powerful impact.
Goodfriend's recent Corporal series includes Anemone, a 20-inch
tall cluster of silicone fingers that resembles a ghostly sea anemone.
(The skeleton of a sea anemone, like that of a coral, becomes totally
bleached over time.) Flight Cage is a ribcage composed of elongated
arms, curved to resemble ribs. The arms' embrace is both comforting
and threatening: each limb ends in a clinched hand that has a sinister
menace. A third piece from the Corporal series is Tongue Ball, a knot of
curling white tongues, each speared with multiple red pins. On closer
view, the red pins are actually vintage millinery stamen, historically
used for flowered hats. Covered with miniature relective glass beads,
they both delight and horrify: even an acupuncturist would resist
putting needles into such a sensitive body part. Perhaps even more
disturbing is Goodfriend's Uterus, a plaster configuration that arranges
hands, feet, ears, and the lower face to resemble the shape of the womb.
All of the weirdly assembled body parts appear to come from a baby.
The irony is adamant here: the cherished innocence of a child is
reconfigured into a Frankenstein-like creation.
Phenomenologists tell us that we know the world through our
body. Touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste--the senses that bring us
information about our surroundings--are all housed in our fleshly form.
Goodfriend challenges our perceived realities with expressively
contorted visions of the body. Like the French Surrealists before her,
Goodfriend understands that the visual can shock and disturb, thus
propelling us into new perceptions, new realities.
Goodfriend's Limb (also from the Corporal series) depicts a
human arm emerging from a tree trunk like a wooden branch. The
collision of two cultural categories--human and plant--forces viewers to
think of them as linked, perhaps even united, rather than separate or
opposed. Poststructuralists remind us that language is culturally
constructed; it is not natural. If human life and plant life are in fact
connected, perhaps we should treat our environmental companions--
such as trees--as valued partners rather than as things to be controlled
and exploited. One of the primary tenets of Surrealism was the
reconciling and uniting of opposites. Artist Annette Goodfriend achieves
such reconciliation with elegant juxtapositions of poetic realism and
expressive distortion.




Shana Nys Dambrot
Los Angeles, 2023

Annette Goodfriend: Uncomfortable Menagerie

“Even though you won't believe me, my story is beautiful. And the serpent that sang it, sang it from out of the well.”
--Leonora Carrington

Sculptor Annette Goodfriend speaks the language of dream logic, her curious forms rendering both plausible and pleasant that which is both impossible and unsettling. With a background in biological science and a fascination with human anatomy, Goodfriend’s particular surrealism is rooted there—fingers, hands, hearts, and lungs, rib cages and intestines, cells, microbes, and genes—as well as in nature. Her science-mindedness finds comfort and structure in the macro/micro interconnectedness of all living things. Her artistry gives profound expression to complex and intertwined human emotions of love, fear, loss, desire, joy, generosity, attraction, kink, repulsion, trust, empathy, and laughter. Working together to tell what she calls, “a surreal story of biology,” Goodfriend composes forms that fuse these impulses into objects of singular beauty and meaningful imagination—unforgettably strange and viscerally believable anatomical poems.
Working primarily with epoxy, resin, rubber, wax, and plaster, Goodfriend casts, sculpts, assembles, and otherwise constructs bodies—well, parts of bodies—with adept finesse, patient attention, and experimental physicality. In her recent Corporal work, the body behaves oddly, yielding plaster-white rib cage whose bone-ends are such tiny hands, a robust blossom-like anemone made of fingers, braids and loops of long arms limp like ropes, and sharp-petaled flowers with hands and fingers for stamen. In her earlier Replacement Parts series, things were still conceptual, and heartbreakingly (and impractically) delicate—a kidney made of wax and butterfly wings, a heart made of leaves, and tiny, elegant reliquaries for the partial carcasses the cats brought home as gifts. Her move away from poetic but fiddly alchemical medicine toward sturdier, more durable and physically hefty materials also represents a move through personal and into, broadly speaking, more art historical terrain—but done without ever leaving behind her life experiences, science education and practice, and sense of story.
The through line between all the series is being both realism and science-based, and captivated by the potential for poetic twist and wit when science, art, nature, and dreams collide. Her father was a surgeon, whose leather bound science books of the 1700’s exerted their mysterious sway on her imagination. Her brother’s genetic illness spurred an early career in biological science, but they found the gene she was planning to look for while she was still in college, so her mind was free to return to the inventive creativity she’d craved—yet forever changed by the time she’d spent in a lab coat. Perhaps it’s there she acquired her high tolerance for what might make another person queasy—body parts, organs, blood and guts, or mutation.
Goodfriend’s influences and ancestors in this art historical vein form a fascinating family from Robert Gober’s phantom limbs to Louise Bourgeois’ conceptual dissections, Leonora Carrington’s flesh and blood bronze monsters and dizzying books with their heady mix of whimsy and dread, Max Ernst with his affection for exposing the hybrid figure, George Segal and Karon Davis who although they work in plaster cast, have created unique languages that remix the human form into vessels of arcane meaning. It’s as though she’s playing a 3-D form of Exquisite Corpse with herself, blending mythology, Jungian archetypes of the subconscious and dreamland, and a working theory of monsters. “Every human being (and not merely the artist) has an inexhaustible store of buried images in his subconscious,” wrote Surrealist painter Max Ernst, “it is merely a matter of courage” to bring them to light. For Goodfriend, it’s perhaps not only courage which is required to give form to her imagination, but rather, compassion—for the broken, the healed, the taken and the given, the viscerally real, and the allegedly impossible, for the thwarted dreamers, the suffering and the silent, for nature, humanity, family, and most especially, for herself.