Brenda Goodman, Steve DiBenedetto, Bendix Harms: This Heat

The New York Studio School presents This Heat, an exhibition of paintings and works by Brenda Goodman, Steve DiBenedetto, and Bendix Harms, on view from September 10 through October 18, 2026. An opening reception will be held Thursday, September 10, from 6–8 PM.

The title is borrowed from the British experimental band This Heat, whose carries the psychic pressure of making something in a world that offers no guarantee of permanence or meaning, while insisting that the attempt to make it still matters. That same pressure runs through the work of Goodman, DiBenedetto, and Harms.

Together, these artists approach painting not as a settled language but as an ongoing problem. Their work bears the residue of time: years of looking, making, revising, failing, beginning again. There is no attempt here to paint from a timeless or academic nowhere. These paintings are evidence of lives lived within a particular historical moment, made by artists who have continued to work despite the impossibility of knowing where the work will lead.

To practice art is to reach outward in the dark and trust that eventually you may find something that leads somewhere. Do it long enough, and you may find another person speaking a language you recognize.

This Heat considers that possibility: three artists, three practices, and the strange continuity that can emerge from decades of looking, working, changing, and refusing to stop.