Joe Goode @ Texas Gallery

Joe Goode
December 4, 2014 - January 10, 2015

2012 Peden Street
Houston, TX 77019

Joe Goode @ Contemporary Art Museum St Louis

Joe Goode
January 16 - April 11, 2015

Joe Goode traces half a century of selected works by one of America’s most innovative yet under-recognized painters. Often identified with Southern California pop art, Goode ultimately transcends this classification, creating bodies of work with influences ranging from Midwestern iconography and environmental destruction to pop culture and the sublime.

Goode first gained international recognition following his inclusion in Walter Hopps’s seminal exhibition New Painting of Common Objects, organized at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. That same year, a key example of Goode’s milk bottle painting series appeared on the cover of Artforum; another commences CAM’s exhibition. In Purple (1961), Goode positions a milk bottle in front of a domineering monochrome canvas, both of which have been applied with layers of purple oil paint. The usually transparent—but now paint-encrusted—bottle foregrounds Goode’s concept of seeing through the picture plane, allowing the viewer to contemplate their own personal and cultural associations within, and through, Goode’s pictorial spaces. 

In addition, the exhibition features representative works from several of the artist’s other series, including bodies of work created in large part through acts of destruction. In his Torn Cloud series (1967–76), Goode often uses razor blades to slash through compositions of illusionistic skies, forming jagged clouds. He then layers excised canvases on top of each other to allow viewers to peer through their torn surfaces. Goode’s performative surface violations increase in intensity with his introduction of firearms in the Environmental Impact series (1978–83). In these works, Goode literally draws with shotgun pellets, using a shotgun to blast through the monochromatic surface of the canvas. The bullets pierce and abrade the surface, forming seemingly chance compositions. 

Tornado Triptych (1992), a monumental sumi ink painting, calls upon the lived Midwestern experience as source for the work’s iconography. Goode’s tornado paintings depict the progression of formidable natural forces, combining the visual liquidity of ink with nature’s raw energy in an uneasy relationship between beauty and violence. In his more recent body of work, titled Flat Screen Nature (2012–current), Goode uses an industrial hand saw to cut through sheets of painted fiberglass, creating allegorical landscapes of jagged edges and menacing peripheries; the artist’s visual vocabulary comes full circle to represent our environment’s vulnerable sky, land, and sea.

Joe Goode demonstrates how depictions of the sublime can speak to contentious American issues ranging from environmental vandalism to the Second Amendment. CAM’s presentation repositions Goode’s critical importance through an in-depth investigation of his concept of beauty through destruction as intrinsically tied to a Midwestern regional sensibility—milk bottles, big sky, tornadoes, and shot guns, for example—that has never before been explored in depth.  In conjunction with the exhibition, CAM will publish a catalog on the artist’s work with an exhibition history and bibliography, a foreword by CAM Executive Director Lisa Melandri, and critical essays by Chief Curator Jeffrey Uslip and art historian Thomas Crow. 

Joe Goode (b. 1937, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); Texas Gallery, Houston (2002, 2004, 2010, 2012); Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York (2009); and Manny Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles (2001, 2005). Goode’s work is included in numerous major museum collections, including the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 

Joe Goode is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Jeffrey Uslip, Chief Curator. 

This exhibition is generously supported by Eve Stelle and Peter Gelles and Joan and Mitch Markow.

Lita Albuquerque @ Laguna Art Museum

Lita Albuquerque Particale Horizon

Troika @ House of the Nobleman

Troika @ House of the Nobleman
Light Fantastic

Lita Albuquerque - Art Media Agency

Kohn Gallery representing Lita Albuquerque

Los Angeles’ Kohn Gallery is now representing artist Lita Albuquerque.

Lita Albuquerque is an American installation, environmental artist, painter and sculptor. Born in California, she has been a part of the Light and Space movement, renowned for her ephemeral installations and Land Art pieces. She has been commissioned to create public art around the world at locations including the Washington Memorial and the Great Pyramids, she also represented the US at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale where she took the top prize.

Michael Kohn is hold an exhibition dedicated to the artist, due to open 15 November 2014. The show will focus on Albuquerque’s “Stellar Axis: Antarctica” project from 2006, which saw her lay out 99 blue spheres across the South Pole, mirroring the sky above, in what was the first large-scale work made in Antarctica. The gallery show will feature photographs, film, objects and archive materials from the piece.

Troika - Paddle8

Small Bang' is a different expression of black. The drawing starts with a single black circle which is continuously, and over a long period of time, exposed to droplets of water. In the beginning, all matter is contained in this black mark, which then expands into a vibrant spectrum of colours. And while the black in completely disappears in the process of making the drawings, the concept of black remains in the form of the sum of all its constituents opening up a parallel world of what we see and what we know.

Lot Number 82
Black ink on paper
47 x 33 cm (18.5 x 12.99 in) - (framed dimensions: 47 x 33 cm)
Framed
Unique
Courtesy of Troika
signed on the back side

Bid Here

Rosa Loy @ Ornis A. Gallery

Rosa Loy at Ornis A. Gallery
September 6 - October 11, 2014

Joe Goode - ArtReview

Joe Goode: Flat Screen Nature

Joe Goode has long made pictures designed to be looked through, not at. His work is deadpan, and seemingly innocuous. The LA Times critic William Wilson, in 1971, called it ‘neutrality-style art’. Perhaps this mildness is why he never got quite as much attention as his childhood friend Ed Ruscha, who also does deadpan but who usually cuts his neutrality with non-sequiturs (often verbal) that are arresting and funny. Goode only trades in the very lightest of humorous touches – a milk bottle painted mauve, for instance, placed on a shelf in front of a mauve monochrome canvas. That was his early Milk Bottle series, (1961-2), still amongst his best-known work.

Now in his seventies, the Los Angeles-based artist continues to experiment and refine. He has filled Michael Kohn’s spacious new gallery on Highland Avenue with apparent ease, showing off a new series of seascapes made on large fibreglass panels. Most of these paintings are only cursorily representational: they typically consist of one horizontal four-by-eight foot panel, painted dark blue, beneath another horizontal panel painted a lighter blue. The seam where the two rectangles meet is the dead level horizon.

Even the simplest paintings here achieve in their brushed surfaces infinite degrees of nuance and depth

Not so fast. Behind the poker-face, Goode is a deft and sensuous painter. Even the simplest paintings here – So Still, for example, or Sail Away (both 2013) – achieve in their brushed surfaces infinite degrees of nuance and depth (their Ikea-bland titles are decoys, I would like to believe). On sustained inspection, Goode’s palette goes far beyond shades of blue. The sky in Sail Away is a lightless grey; in Cruising (2013) soft clouds of dusty pink pile up on the horizon. The best paintings here, like the sublime Know Means No (2013) and the extraordinary, infernal, Honk If You See Jesus (2014), are the ones that stray furthest from the programmatic simplicity of Goode’s template.

In any case, these paintings really aren’t about sea and sky. They are about their ontological status as objects that attempt – and fail – to capture a particular archetype of pristine natural perfection. We know this because Goode has taken a grinder to the sides of the fibreglass panels, cutting off corners and gouging into horizons. These torn edges reveal a honeycomb mesh inside the fibreglass; this too represents a kind of perfection, in contrast to which the painted surfaces seem weathered and dirty. In past works, as with the Torn Sky and Torn Cloud series (1969–76), Goode slashed canvases that he’d painted and then mounted the wreckage over another canvas support. A selection of charcoal drawings in this show, from 1977, consists of dark clouds on paper that has subsequently been scratched and gouged.

Goode titled the exhibition Flat Screen Nature. In places, the texture of the honeycomb panels gives the paint a pixelated effect, which apparently reminded the artist of a computer or television screen. (Again, surfaces to be looked through.) But this contemporary technological twist seems less germane than the works’ relationship to the divergent histories of landscape and non-representational monochrome painting. After all, how relevant, really, is pixilation to digital experience in the era of Retina screens and HD?

Goode is at his best when he keeps it analogue. In a side gallery, several charcoal drawings from his X-ray series (1976) depict sheets of tattered white paper apparently taped against a dark background. Goode’s method was to tape one piece of ripped paper to another clean sheet, and to strafe it with charcoal powder. When he removed the taped-on piece, a perfect x-ray-like impression remained. The drawings offset the gritty evidence of their own dilapidation with transcendent illusionism. They are perfect, even as they are ruined.

By Jonathan Griffin

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Joe Goode - LA Weekly

5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week, Including an Art Talk Show

1. That might be Jesus 
If you know painter Joe Goode, who road-tripped to L.A. from Oklahoma in 1959 to make his go as an artist, you probably know his drawings of torn paper or paintings of blue skies. They’re pretty nonchalant and usually modestly sized, so it’s surprising to see how big and majestic the new paintings in his "Flat Screen Nature" show at Kohn Gallery are. They’re two-tone expanses of color painted on sheets of fiberglass. Even though you could tumble right into those deep blues, Goode’s still not taking himself too seriously. Every piece has weirdly ragged edges and the titles are jokes: Honk if You See Jesus for one with a ghostly shape near the bottom, or Coming Attraction for one that looks like a big-screen sunset.

By Catherine Wagley