Dryden Goodwin


Dryden Goodwin based in London, is a British artist known for his intricate drawings, often in combination with photography and live action video; he creates films, gallery installations, projects in public space, etchings, works on-line and soundtracks.

Biography and themes

Goodwin was born in Bournemouth. Central to Goodwin's practice is a fascination with drawing. He is engaged with time as well as line, and with the sculptural potential of two-dimensional images. Other concerns in his practice are the city, ideas of public and private, voyeurism, desire and emotional distance and proximity.
Goodwin's work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, The National Portrait Gallery, London, the Venice Biennale, OCAT Contemporary Art Museum Xi'an, China and the Hasselblad Foundation in Gothenburg, Sweden. His work is in collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Tate Collection and The National Portrait Gallery, London. His films have been shown in many international festivals since 1995.

“…Dryden Goodwin’s art has been defined by an increasingly rich dialogue between drawing, photography and film. In this work he has consistently focused on the human figure and the portrait form, the resulting work offering a speculative vision that considers the process of looking and representing, both in relation to what is experienced and what is seen.
That this speculation is always fluid, that no one act of representation, no one point of description, can ever be finally resolved in time, is also the idea which drives the shifting relationships between different media and the layered nature of Goodwin’s work. Often grounded in an experience of the city, Goodwin wrestles with the continually changing nature of our contact with the people around us, both the well known – family and friends – and the anonymous, the strangers we pass on the street.
His work marks an intense curiosity, a desire to know, and yet it is always alive with ambiguities about what the act of making work might reveal or obscure.” – David Chandler

Solo exhibitions and projects