Joe Goode

I love Joe Goode’s current work. An unfortunate fire that destroyed a whole body of work in 2005 led Goode to reassess his output, and consequently create some stunning imagery. Goode was born in 1937 in Oklahoma City, and from 1959 to 1961 attended the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Famous for his ‘Pop Art’ milk bottle paintings and cloud imagery, Goode's first solo show was in San Francisco in 1962 at the Dilexi Gallery.

In the same year his work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Robert Dowd, Edward Ruscha and Wayne Thiebaud in the historically important and ground-breaking New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum. This historical exhibition is considered one of the first ‘Pop Art’ exhibitions in America.

In 2004 Joe Goode began work on a group of paintings that re-examined his past work. Each oil painting featured a photograph affixed to the face, which represented every major series he had produced to date. Goode then used a gas torch to burn holes in the completed piece, which when hung, cast haunting shadows on the wall beneath. After a year’s work, this body had grown to around 40 pieces. These paintings were destroyed in a fire in Goode’s studio in 2005.

From this fire, Goode created three new bodies of work. These series marks important changes in Goode artistic process – using the photograph as a means for making larger paintings, and the last time Goode would use oil paint, and the first time, at age 68, he would use acrylic.

Over the years, Joe 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.

1963 House Painting

1972 Cloud Painting 73

1973 Torn Cloud Painting 83

1974 Torn Cloud

1977 Black Drawing 4

1980-81 Environmental Impact 16

1981 Environmental Impact lithograph

2004 Milk Bottle Photo 27

 2006 While Venice Sleeps III ...2006mm 40

 2007 J and E Diptych #2

 2008 Birthdays

 2008 Glass House

 2008 Lichen Language

 2008 Michael

 2008 Milk Bottle Behind the Scenes

 2008 Stage Fright

 2008 Studies from the Past 12

 2008 Studies of the Past 9

 2008 Studies of the Past 35

 2008 Studies of the Past 33

 2008 Two Tomato

 2009 Featured Milk Bottle 04

 2009 Milk Bottle Sculpture 08

 2009 Milk Bottle Sculpture 15

2012 Acid

2013 Cracked Bottom

2013 Cruising

2013 Know Means No

2013 Too Late

Stéphane Couturier photography

Some of the photographs of Stéphane Couturier resemble the urban photography I have already featured – by Andreas Gursky and Michael Wolf – the head-on squared up building shots, but the others shown here are far more individual.

Couturiers photographs, whether of construction sites in Berlin, demolished buildings in Havana, or an automobile assembly plant in Valenciennes, are all about transformation, a subject he explores with a strong sense of design and composition and a brilliant sense of colour. Couturier began his career as an art photographer in his native Paris in the early 1990s and has since made significant bodies of work in Dresden, Berlin, Seoul, Moscow, Beijing, and most recently Havana. His images are characterized by a vast array of visual information and a conception that separates him from his contemporary German counterparts. He searches for visually complex sites exhibiting dynamic vertical and horizontal lines, elegant curves, and brilliant effects of light and indigenous colour.

Stéphane Couturier was born in Neuilly sur Seine, France, in 1957. His photographs have been featured at many international venues such as the Moscow Biennial, the ICP Triennial, Centre Georges Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg and the Museum of Photography, Charleroi, Belgium.

He is also in most major American museums and collections. The Art Institute of Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yale Art Gallery, Nelson-Atkins Museum, The National Gallery of Art and Santa Barbara Museum of Art, as well as the LaSalle National Bank corporate collection. In 2004, the Bibliotheque National in Paris featured a major retrospective of his career to date.