Goode emerged within the early Nineteen Sixties as a member of the “Cool School,” a gaggle of LA artists together with Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman, and others centered across the legendary Ferus Gallery, although Goode by no means really had a present there. Although he exhibited extensively all through his profession and his work resides in dozens of museum collections, he by no means achieved the notoriety of a few of his colleagues, maybe as a result of his work was laborious to pin down, drawing associations to Pop Artwork, conceptual artwork, and the Gentle & House motion.
Joe Goode, “Untitled (House)” (1963)
Born in Oklahoma Metropolis in 1937, Goode had early publicity to artwork via his father, a portrait artist and signal painter. The pair would watch TV collectively and draw fast sketches of characters on varied applications. Goode was childhood pals with Ed Ruscha, who left to check on the Chouinard Artwork Institute in LA in 1956, with Goode following swimsuit three years later. At Chouinard, he studied with Robert Irwin and counted John Altoon and Larry Bell amongst his classmates.
“I didn’t know I wanted to be an artist until I came to L.A., but I always knew I could be an artist,” he recalled in a 2016 catalogue revealed by Michael Kohn Gallery.
Joe Goode in entrance of considered one of his “Milk Bottle” work in 1962 (picture by Steven Steinman)
Goode acquired early recognition for his “Milk Bottle” work begun in 1961, monochromatic, closely brushed canvases that includes the silhouette of the traditional glass container in entrance of which Goode positioned an precise bottle. Blurring the strains between portray and sculpture, Pop Artwork and minimalism, they evoked a type of mundane American domesticity, reflecting Goode’s Midwest origins. Two of those works had been included in New Work of Widespread Objects, the seminal 1962 exhibition curated by Walter Hopps on the Pasadena Artwork Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum).
Regardless of displaying alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Ruscha, Goode bristled considerably on the Pop Artwork label. “I was always aware that my work wasn’t Pop,” Goode wrote in 2017. “I had the attitude of, I don’t care where you show me as long as you show me.”
Joe Goode, “Untitled” (1974), lithograph with razor blade impression on two sheets of Roll Rives sewn collectively at high border (picture courtesy Cirrus Editions Ltd.)
He supplied a surreal send-up of Minimalism with a subsequent sequence of picket “stair” sculptures, created within the mid- to late-Nineteen Sixties, wooden and carpet constructions positioned in opposition to the wall that hovered between the acquainted and the formal, finally main nowhere.
Although he lacked an simply recognizable signature fashion, Goode was pushed by a relentless striving to reframe how we see artistic endeavors and the world round us. Along with his cloud work from the Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, he sliced via painted skies with razor blades to disclose a second celestial layer. He blasted monochromatic canvases with a shotgun in his Environmental Affect sequence (1978–83), and used an industrial hand noticed to jaggedly lower painted fiberglass sheets for his Flat Display screen Nature sequence of the 2010s, merging lyrical magnificence with visible violence.
“Joe was an innately gifted painter, able to produce the most gorgeously painted works while his subject matter often remained prickly (like Joe himself, smart and prickly!)” his gallerist Michael Kohn advised Hyperallergic.
“He questioned the authenticity of experience through his color-saturated world-view. He wanted the viewer to remember that no matter how beautiful the painting, you are looking at a man-made image.”
Joe Goode, “Untitled” (c.1968)
Joe Goode, “Bo” (1962) 
Joe Goode “Untitled” (1981)
