Leslie Sacks Gallery Presents Joe Goode | Environmental Impacts

Leslie Sacks Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of mixed media works on paper by renowned Los Angeles artist, Joe Goode. Environmental Impacts will present works on paper across four bodies of work from the acclaimed artist--Tornados, Ocean Blue, Forest Fires and Environmental Impact (Shotguns). Much like the real-world experience of the subjects themselves, these compositions are all-at-once terrifying, beautiful, brooding, and awe-inspiring in their magnitude and dynamism.

Well-known­ for his atmospheric portrayal of Earthly elements and events, Joe Goode evokes a sense of the sublime while conveying concepts of environmental destruction by forces of nature and the inherent beauty they pose. From his roots growing up in Oklahoma to his decades-long residency in Southern California, Goode offers a wide range of visual vocabulary, all of which draws on the dual connection to both locales. Within the context of the very real present day realities of climate change, this work inescapably raises questions about the power, prevalence and devastation of natural disasters, evoking the effects of climate change and mankind's impact on the world.

Goode's curiosity around these subjects further connects to humanity's irresistible fascination to the uncontrollable, dangerous and destructive influence of nature. He looks beyond the singular defining quality of these elements to the parallel existence of their aesthetic grandeur and beauty, which altogether are larger than man and mortality.

Joe Goode conceives and executes an idea through a variety of media disciplines. He is focused on achieving a composition through any physical process available from printmaking or photography to then tearing, shooting or painting his matrix and in many cases a combination thereof. Joe Goode's Environmental Impact works offer transcendent imagery employing Sumi inks, oil pastels and powdered pigments. The Tornado series from 1991-92 are ominous twisting abstractions, clearly nodding to his mid-western roots. The Forest Fires from 1983-85 are ablaze and rendered in a smoldering pastel palette.

The enormity of destruction and the overwhelming nature of fire were awe-inspiring for the artist who, ironically, suffered a devastating fire in his studio in 2005. In the color test prints from the Ocean Blue series of 1988-90, Goode composites the power of the ocean from an aerial perceptive, frothing and foaming in variant swirling shades of blues. In many of his works, Goode confronts the uniform surface of the picture plane, puncturing the surface to expose the layers of colored material beneath. In his series known as the Shotguns from 1980, the artist pierces the pigmented surface with gunshots fired from a shotgun. The subsequent bullet holes impale the paper and become the composition. This body of work largely addresses human interaction with the societal environment.

Joe Goode arrived from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles in 1959 where he attended the Chouinard Institute and became immersed in the L.A. art scene with his work tangentially influenced by the Light and Space conceptual art movement and by his peers and friends like Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, James Turrell and Robert Irwin. Over the past fifty years, Joe Goode's work has been exhibited in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide. His work is held in esteemed institutions, public and private collections. He is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Menil Collection, The Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of America Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York just to name a few. In January 2015 a major survey Joe Goode's work was exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.

Leslie Sacks Gallery is located in Santa Monica at Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Avenue, Suite B6. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday 10-6, Saturday 11-6. For more information visit lesliesacks.com, email gallery@lesliesacks.com or call 310 264 0640.