Catherine Goodman

Catherine Anne Goodman was born in London in 1961. She trained at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts from 1979 to 1984 and then at the Royal Academy Schools from 1984 to 1987, where she won the Royal Academy Gold Medal. Her early practice centered on figurative painting, particularly portraiture, in a mode often linked to the School of London tradition.

In 2002 she won First Prize in the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery, and the gallery later acquired her portrait of the film director Stephen Frears for its collection. In 2000 she co-founded what became the Royal Drawing School with the then Prince of Wales, now King Charles III, and remained closely associated with the school in the years that followed. She was represented by Marlborough Fine Art from 2004 and has been an Artist Trustee of the National Gallery, London, since 2019.

Her practice has since expanded from portraiture and landscape into monumental, largely abstract painting, a shift reflected in exhibitions such as And everything changed (2021) at Marlborough, and later in New Works (2024) and Silent Music (2025) at Hauser & Wirth, which now represents her; a further exhibition responding to tapestries at Boughton House, Northamptonshire, is planned for summer 2026. She was appointed CBE in 2024 for services to art. She lives and works in London and Somerset.

Goodman's reputation was built first on portraiture, capped by her 2002 BP Portrait Award win at the National Portrait Gallery. Her later, largely abstract paintings for Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles and New York have been presented by the gallery and covered in outlets including the Observer and Cultured as a significant expansion of her practice, moving from figuration toward monumental abstraction while retaining the same close attention to surface and material.

Goodman's market runs primarily through her galleries rather than through a deep auction history. The best-documented auction result is Solo, which sold for USD 165,100 at Christie's New York in a Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale in 2025, described by Christie's as having set a new artist record at the time. Secondary sources report a further, higher price for a work titled An interior with a view of a cottage in 2026, but published transaction detail (exact price, currency, house, and date) is not yet available, so that figure cannot be confirmed here. Earlier UK regional sales of her work were modest by comparison, generally in the low thousands of pounds, underscoring how recent her move into higher auction values has been.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Catherine Goodman, so provenance and gallery verification through Hauser & Wirth carry particular weight. Her auction history is thin relative to her institutional profile, with only a small number of fully documented results, which means any single auction price should be read with caution rather than as a stable market benchmark. Her recent move from Marlborough Fine Art to Hauser & Wirth, alongside a growing exhibition schedule running into 2026, is the clearest signal of a market still being established at auction.