Joe Goode 60s and 70s

Franklin Parrasch Gallery is please to announce an exhibition of paintings from the 1960's and 1970's by Los Angeles based artist Joe Goode.

In 1960 Goode fled his Oklahoma roots and headed west (at the behest of high school pal and fellow artist Ed Ruscha) to California, assuming his place in the collective huddle of the just burgeoning Los Angeles art scene. As struggling young artists and students at the acclaimed Chouinard Art Institute (under the instruction of Emerson Woelffer and Robert Irwin) Goode and Ruscha shared apartments, workspaces and social acquaintances throughout the early 1960's. Goode's experience of western migration and establishing a new identity has served to feed the central themes of perception and isolation that have consistently been the focus of his work throughout his career.

Goode's work has undergone various levels of interpretation over the past forty-five years from the time a work from his acclaimed Milk Bottle series was published on the cover of Artforum in 1962. In the article from that issue entitled "The New Paintings of Common Objects" John Coplans comments on Goode and two of the Milk Bottle paintings:

"An American painter named Joe Goode created two of the loneliest paintings imaginable. They represent a totally new and radically different approach to the quest for identity… He sets a standard in the use of concrete objects not to be surpassed, creating a whole new sense and logic of structure on our time. Goode has absorbed this new sense and uses it to create two most powerful, deeply moving and mysterious paintings."

Goode has always drawn his iconography from his environment. While his imagery may be symbolic - e.g. staircases, milk bottles, unmade beds, torn clouds - it is personal experience that drives his decisions concerning what to paint.

This exhibition is comprised of six paintings dating from 1968 to 1973 – all of which have been previously exhibited at the famed Nicholas Wilder Gallery in Los Angeles during this same period. Represented are works from the Unmade Bed, the Window Cloud, the Photo Cloud, and the Torn Cloud series.

Joe Goode 60s and 70s