Leslie Sacks Gallery is pleased to announce Sea and Sky, an exhibition of works on paper by legendary Los Angeles based artist, Joe Goode (b. 1937, Oklahoma City). Presenting drawings, lithographs, and mixed media from 1969-1990, Sea and Sky highlights three of Joe Goode’s iconic series: Photo Clouds (1969-1971), Torn Sky (1975) and Ocean Blue (1988-1990).
Made in Milan, Italy in 1969, Joe Goode’s Photo Cloud series appropriates his own Polaroid photographs of clouds and photographs them amid colored lighting and other in-studio visual effects. In this pre-Photoshop era construct, Goode successfully captures extraordinary physical and ideological dimension among the free-floating weightlessness of Polaroid’s in flight, curious and witty compositions--a photograph of photographs.
Joe Goode’s Torn Sky series from 1975 comprises paintings, pastel drawings, and a series of mixed media unique color trial proofs. The color proofs are assembled lithographs wrapped with delicate, torn tissue paper. The tissue paper incisions act as stand-ins for clouds, which both complete and disrupt the celestial plane. By reversing the conventional figure-ground relationship, Goode suggests something that lies beneath; scratch the surface and one finds a revelation. Confronting and often literally breaking through the picture-plane to reveal, expose or create impact is a hallmark of Goode’s work. This interaction with the surface brings to mind the work of Lucio Fontana who famously slashed his canvases revealing a void beyond the picture plane. In the context of the natural world, Torn Sky offers contemplation of human interaction with the environment.
In the Ocean Blue series from 1988-90, Goode offers an unusual oceanic vantage point with his satellite-ariel perspective of swirling fathoms of the ocean. They contemplate a planetary scope of Earth and inescapably call to mind ideas around weather and climate change. They are chromatic abstractions and have a strikingly similar feeling to the tonalist works of J.M.W. Turner, whose expressively colorized landscapes capture the fleeting feeling of the momentous experience of nature. They evoke inescapable elemental forces which are both undeniably beautiful and ominous.
Joe Goode’s work has been exhibited in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. His work is held in the permanent collections of numerous esteemed public and private institutions and collections; among them Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Menil Collection, The Smithsonian Institution, Whitney Museum of America Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, National Gallery of Australia, The Art Institute of Chicago, Fondation Carmignac, Paris, Museum of Modern Art, Jerusalem. In 2015 a major survey Joe Goode’s work was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. Joe Goode currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.