Joe Goode US, b. 1937
"To me, I just kept thinking the only thing you can paint is what you know or what you see, and so that’s how I just kind of kept going farther and farther –the images that I selected kept going farther and farther away."
– Joe Goode
Joe Goode is an American artist. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1937. In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he attended the Chouinard Art Institute until 1961.
First recognized for his Pop Art milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode’s work was included along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud, in the 1962 ground-breaking 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.
Through the years, Goode has combined various traditional and non-traditional media in the creation of his artwork. He has explored images which project a way of seeing “in and out” and “up and down” as well as things that can be seen through: milk bottles, oceans, waterfalls, clouds and torn skies. While his subject matter has remained relatively consistent over the years, he has revisited each theme using different media, aiding him in finding unique ways in which he continues to work. Most of the artist’s paintings are color field, and other paintings superimpose mundane, everyday objects on top of the color field.
Inspired by natural forces, Joe Goode seeks to convey the process of perception in his paintings. Along with artists like James Turrell and Robert Irwin, Goode is associated with Light and Space, a West Coast movement dedicated to exploring the experience of seeing that emerged in the early 1960s. In his paintings, Goode walks the line between abstraction and representation. He gives hints of recognizable forms and uses subtle gradations of color and visible brushstrokes to stimulate viewers to reconsider their own perceptual experiences.
Over the past fifty years, 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. Goode currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
