Joe Goode

Zander Galerie is pleased to present an exhibition of large-scale oil paintings and works on paper by Joe Goode, spanning over three decades of the artist's sustained engagement with the sky as both subject and site of intervention. Bringing together works from 1969 to 2002, the exhibition traces Goode's exploration of transparency across a range of cloud paintings alongside later skyscapes that register environmental change.

Since the late 1960s, Goode has taken a blade to freshly painted skies, slicing away sections of canvas to expose a second, contrasting layer beneath. In his single panels and triptychs, some extending to more than 3.5 meters (twelve feet) in width, these acts of physical destruction reveal either another painted layer or the raw support of the painting. In the earlier “Photo Cloud” works, trompe l'oeil Polaroids are painted as if drifting across pastel skies, doubling the act of representation. The skyscapes of the 1990s and 2000s are resplendently colorful, their radiant surfaces hovering between atmospheric observation and abstraction. Selected works on paper in graphite and charcoal powder offer a largely monochrome counterpoint, distilling Goode's preoccupation with seeing through the picture plane.

 Defying the categories of both the Light and Space movement and Pop Art, Goode was part of the Los Angeles art scene that emerged in in the 1960s, alongside Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell and Ed Kienholz. Throughout his later work, Goode continued to test the boundaries between the pictorial space and painting’s material objecthood, treating destruction as a means of disclosure and conceptual renewal.