Opening: Saturday, 29 August 2026, 3-6pm
Zander Galerie is pleased to present Torn Skies, an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by American artist Joe Goode (1937–2025). Covering more than three decades, the exhibition brings together key works from some of the artist’s most significant bodies of work.
One would expect series to help artists who use them compartmentalize their subjects, allowing for a treatment of one in independence from others. Surprising, then, is the maintained centrality of a single notion in the work of Joe Goode (1937-2025), who is unmistakably a serial painter. Perhaps even more important than its recurrence is the very substance of this central notion: the sky. Vast, all-encompassing, total, everything but central in a localized, nuclear fashion: on the contrary, stretched to omnipotence, in the real world as in Goode’s formal development.
It seems to be because, throughout many of his series, Goode tackles the sky in all its aforementioned vastness that his paintings often approach the monochrome. There are nonetheless countless nuances: on a very soft mode, as if a cloud passes by the painting (Untitled (from the Vandalism series), 1975) or if the color in some local parts of the sky start to change, like the appearances of dusk in the 1969 Untitled painting or dawn in the very light blue of his 1969-70 Photo Cloud Painting 100 (Triptych). Nuances in Goode’s skies also exist on a more pronounced mode: when fragments of what then seem to become other skies, from other hours or other parts of the world, come to stain the first, original one, as if piecing through it, for example in the 1972 drawing Torn Sky, or again in the 1975 Untitled painting belonging to the Vandalismseries. In painting as well as drawing, Goode is particularly attentive to variations and movements, albeit very subtle, abstract, as shown by his numerous 2001 studies. He doesn’t seem to consider the sky as one monolithic and immovable entity, fixed and remote, but on the contrary as ever-evolving matter, both irrevocably present in our world and in constant, unstoppable mutation. This dual nature of the sky, between centrality and diffusion, permanence and change, is particularly well-mirrored by Goode’s maintained attention toward it, from one technique to another, and from one series to the next.
A lifelong friend of Ed Ruscha, whom he met when both were children, Joe Goode grew up (as did Ruscha) in Oklahoma City, and arrived in Los Angeles three years later than his friend, in 1959, when he enrolled (just like Ruscha, also born in 1937) at Chouinard Art Institute, now part of the famed CalArts. By 1961, Goode had already expressed “his interest in common objects,” as described by his oldest friend (who was already experimenting with painted language) through the inclusion of milk bottles in his painting vocabulary. A defining American object, presumably on every suburban doorstep of the country every morning, only a few conceptual steps separate the milk bottle from the Milky Way, of which the sky is the very cradle.
It is, retrospectively, in this light that one could read the cover for the November 1962 issue of Artforum (only the sixth issue of the journal), chosen among Goode’s earliest works: Untitled Milk Bottle (Purple), a 1962 painting in which a bottle stands on what seems to be the floor of the artwork, its two shadows casted on a purple backdrop, already creating a sense of encapsulating yet abstract, loosely qualified environment: real space. Ruscha himself signaled that Goode “had some kind of cosmic connection to milk bottles.”
Since the dawn of the 1960s, when Goode began his career as a painter, the sky has thus held a defining place throughout his many series. While it is at the center of the Cloud Triptych, painted in 1964, which “prepared the ground for pretty much everything [Goode]’s done since then” according to Kristine McKenna,it is the focal point of the Photo Cloud (1967-69) and the Torn Clouds (1970-76) series, as well as theVandalized Clouds (1971-75) one. Many more of his formal directions, although their title don’t necessarily indicate it, are intimately linked to the sky in one way or another. The House or the Window paintings, for example, but also the Environmental Impact and the Fire ones, these two latter extending the sky to the conceptual zones of atmosphere, surroundings: the global context in which humanity evolves.
The sky, whether pristine or torn, brings all of Goode’s works under it, in it, conveying a sense of togetherness, as it does in the real, material world. It furthermore has a distinct resonance in the immediate context of Goode’s formal development. While he was beginning as an artist, John McLaughlin (1898-1976) was painting what was to become a central influence for the Light and Space movement of the 1970s, a defining landmark for the Los Angeles scene—DeWain Valentine (1936-2022) in sculpture, Doug Wheeler (born in 1939) in light. These two artists and Goode share a distinctive interest in the sky, even if Valentine and Wheeler pursued it in a very physical, direct way, embodied, while Goode was to explore its environmental quality in more visual terms, with paintings of ambitious horizontal dimensions, recalling the movie screen-like canvases of his friend Ruscha. The sky operates another bridging: both a fragment of the real and a symbol of infinity, it links Goode’s “interest in common objects,” which according to Ruscha began as early as “in an art class taught by Miss Mary Lamb Lewis” in Oklahoma, with the very vastness usually foregone by these common objects, leaning toward a conceptuality of the experienced world Goode has been so efficient at hinting toward. Goode’s skies, then, are what ultimately allow for viewers to consider his paintings as both Pop and conceptual: very real, yet immaterial; in one word: ethereal.
Over a career spanning more than six decades, Joe Goode’s work was presented in numerous exhibitions in the United States and internationally, including presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2015, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis organized a major survey of his work. His works are held in leading public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Menil Collection and the Smithsonian Institution.
