For the past five decades, Joe Goode’s paintings have blended both abstraction and figuration, referencing both natural and manmade domains. The present lot titled Clouds belongs to a series painted in the late 1960s to early 1970s, which probed the boundaries of reality and illusion. Against a green background, Goode has painted a rumpled white sheet, a torn Polaroid cloud study photograph, and illusionistic stains of blue and white liquid. While the three-dimensionality of the background is subverted by the illusionistic surface stains, the torn Polaroid contrasts photographic and painted representation. These dichotomies bring to question whether the stains are the result of the artist’s work on the sheet and the Polaroid, or whether this is just one component in the larger play of visual presence and illusion. As such, Goode’s use of the trompe l’oeil effect forces viewers to question their initial perceptions. He furthers this complication by choosing to house the work in a Plexiglas box frame, deliberately introducing the viewer’s reflection into the viewing experience of the work. Demonstrating his fascination with surfaces, Goode states that his choice of Plexiglas was not intended just to protect the painting, but to include a reflection of the viewer in the painting as well.
Born in Oklahoma City in 1937, Goode moved to Los Angeles in 1960 with his childhood friend Ed Ruscha, where they both studied at the Chouinard Art Institute under Emerson Woelffer and Robert Irwin. His first exhibition of paintings in 1962 was held at the Dilexi Gallery, Los Angeles, which propelled him into the national spotlight. Some of these works were then included in Walter Hopps’ survey of early Pop art titled New Paintings of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum later that year. Widely exhibited internationally, Goode’s work is also housed in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Menil Collection, Houston. In 1973, the same year as the present lot’s execution, he was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Fort Worth Art Center and later, a retrospective organized by the Orange County Museum of Art in 1997.