Joe Goode, 20 Years Later...

June 18 - August 7, 2021
Gallery 3

Kohn Gallery is honored to announce 20 Years Later…, an exhibition featuring historically significant paintings by prominent California Light and Space artist, Joe Goode. Created at the turn of the last century from 1999 to 2003, the works on view belong to Goode’s three seminal series: Oil and Water, Night and Day, and Cause and Effect. Investigating duality and the sublime qualities of nature these works present the paradox of opposing natural elements, the passage of time, and the consequences of human interaction with the Earth’s delicate climate. The works in a general way refer back to Goode’s sky paintings of the 1970s, but modified with more abstracted atmospheric effects. These works display Goode’s ability to imbue painting with resonant subject matter as well as formal beauty.

A member of the Los Angeles “Cool School,” Goode was a constitutive figure of the burgeoning Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s. His work was included in the 1962 groundbreaking exhibit, “New Painting of Common Objects,” curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum), alongside Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha among others. This was the first Pop Art exhibition in a museum in the United States. It earned Goode critical acclaim, while securing his place in art history. After more than a half a century of producing innovative paintings, sculptures, works on paper, prints and photographs, Joe Goode is integral to the story of American art. 

Artist Page

Joe Goode, Old Ideas with New Solutions

June 18 - August 7, 2021
Gallery 3

“Old Ideas with New Solutions,” features significant new paintings by prominent California Light/Space and Conceptual artist, Joe Goode, opening on his 80th Birthday, Thursday, March 23rd at Kohn Gallery. The works on view from four major series titled Milk Bottle, Ocean Blue, California Summer and TV Blues, will occupy the main and adjacent galleries. Goode’s paintings of the sea’s blue depths are profoundly alluring, while human impact on the ocean threatens catastrophe. The heat of California Summer is vivid and ravishing until the notion of global warming surfaces. Pulchritude and decay; semblance and structure; beauty and the beast. Employing this strategy throughout his career Goode molded his work into a poignantly inextricable mix of stunning attraction and jarring realism. 

Celebrating Goode’s prolific, sixty year long career and this latest exhibition, Kohn Gallery is thrilled to release a major monographic publication, Joe Goode: Paintings 1960-2016, with an introduction by Ed Ruscha and text by Kristine McKenna. The 220 page tome shows numerous examples of painting and sculpture from 1960 to the present.

Goode is a seminal figure in the development of the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1960s. His work was included in the 1962 groundbreaking exhibit, “New Painting of Common Objects,” curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum). This historical exhibition included artists, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha among others, and is considered the first museum Pop Art exhibition in the United States. It earned Goode critical acclaim, while securing his place in art history.

From the 1961 Milk Bottle paintings to his latest works, Goode has consistently questioned the nature of experience through the continuous refinement of this basic, conceptual theme. Goode’s Pop works from the 1960s to mid 1970s (Milk Bottles, Houses and Clouds, et al.) questions the authenticity of experience through the illustrative style of reproducing reproductions (Polaroids, houses, spoons, glasses, shadows of milk bottles), while also enveloping these images in a traditionally elegant abstract painting. After more than a half a century of producing innovative paintings, sculptures, works on paper, prints and photographs, Joe Goode is integral to the story of American art. 

Goode’s reinvention of his early themes always produces something new, often incorporating a practice of experimentation with a variety of materials. In the catalogue, Goode states, “…if I can’t find a new way of seeing something then I’m not interested in it”. The paintings in this exhibition are brought to life with the artist’s masterful use of color and continual shift of perception, moving between the margins of the literal and the abstract.

In the new Milk Bottle series, Goode explores representation and abstraction as the works confront the viewer with an object coming forward to engage in their space. In other works, the point of view of the bottle is flipped and exists on the same plane as the painting, interacting in a new way and bridging the two. Recent works also include Goode’s notable study of destruction by coating splattered “milk” on the monochromatic background. The recent Ocean Blue series is a powerful ode to nature, and furthers perceptual inquiry. The enveloping and luminous colors come not from the reflection of the surface of the water, but the perspective of the viewer fully submerged in the ocean’s boundless expanse. California Summer resumes his investigation into the natural environment unique to southern California. Fiery, rich colors from the setting emerge through his dissection of reality. Lastly, and most recently, the TV Blues series draws from the themes of Ocean Blue and California Summer. Goode’s commanding use of blue color fields from the previous series reverberates in these works. The paintings offer the viewer a scene of nature through the rectangular shape of a television screen.

Artist Page

Joe Goode, Flat Screen Nature

July 12 - August 29, 2014
Gallery 1, 2 & 3

It seems every image I have used since completing school has to do with seeing through something, whether it is glass, water, skies, fires, trees…everything. What I am doing is projecting a way of seeing, essentially the same way through a different avenue, through a different image... – Joe Goode

Los Angeles, California – Kohn Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by southern California-based, Light/Space and Conceptual artist, Joe Goode. The new series, titled Flat Screen Nature, is the culmination of the brilliant ideas and bold experiments Goode has investigated over the course of his fifty-year career. Beginning with his Milk Bottle series (early 1960s), his art practice questions the impermeability of the surface of the painting.  The artist toys with the boundaries of the literal and the abstract while looking through the visible world, dissecting matter until it dissolves into immensely beautiful fields of color. Goode expanded on this theme of “looking through” with his Torn Sky series of the early-to-mid 1970s by literally slashing layers of serene cloudscapes with razors and knives. Here the artist’s violent action creates depth in these placid, meditative surfaces that often reveal other painted canvases below the surface, or even the structure of the canvas itself. Continuing with this theme in later series such as Nighttime, the slashed surfaces often become so deep as to reveal the wall behind them.

Drawing inspiration from his own history and art practice, Flat Screen Nature is informed by the powerful odes to nature and expression found in his earlier series, as well as his Cloud (mid-to-late 1960s), Ocean (late 1980s), and Ozone (early-to-mid 1990s). Like these historical, canonized series, Flat Screen Nature toys with perception and audience engagement. While atmospheric and sublime, this body of work is simultaneously hyperaware of its own structure and materiality. In contrast to the works from the Torn Sky and Nighttime series, Goode slashes and claws at the edges of Flat Screen Nature, revealing the fiberglass “canvas” and giving way to the appearance of the painting emerging from the wall beneath. In leaving everything but the edges intact, the containment of this destructive energy signifies a return in Goode’s practice: Instead of seeing through the painting to the wall beneath, one is confronted with an object coming forward to engage with the viewer’s space (a call back to the artist’s iconic Milk Bottle paintings). While his work continues to explore the process of “creation, destruction, creation” (Goode), and the atmospheric influence of the California sky and ocean, the psychology of painterly effects is underscored and brought to the foreground.

First recognized for his Pop Art milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode's work was included in the 1962 groundbreaking exhibit “New Painting of Common Objects,” curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum (now Norton Simon Museum). This historical exhibition was the first museum Pop Art exhibition in the United States. Since then, Goode’s work has been shown in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. His work is included in many major museum collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Menil Collection, The Smithsonian Institution, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art New York. In January 2015, a major survey of Joe Goode’s work will be on view at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Joe Goode: Flat Screen Nature is the second show in Kohn Gallery’s new, expansive 12,000 square foot space. Designed by Malibu-based architect Lester Tobias, the new gallery building features an immense space with 22-foot ceilings, allowing for stunning exhibitions on a monumental scale. This design also incorporates a massive glass window along Highland Avenue and extensive skylights to bathe the gallery with natural light. With an eye always towards the future, the Kohn Gallery will utilize this expansive new exhibition space to continue to mount bold exhibitions of established and emerging artists.

Artist Page