Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to present Joe Goode: Clouds – Paintings and Drawings from the ‘60s and ‘70s. This exhibition, comprising five paintings and two drawings, represents various facets of this Los Angeles-based artist’s extensive investigation of the cloud, both as image and metaphor.

Born in Oklahoma City in 1937, Goode migrated to Los Angeles in 1959 to study under Emerson Woelffer and Robert Irwin at the Chouinard Art Institute. Accompanied by high school friends and artists Ed Ruscha and Jerry McMillan, Goode immersed himself in the study and exploration of abstract painting.

Goode first began painting clouds in the mid 1960s in a very direct, painterly style. The earliest work in this show, Untitled (1965), portrays a group of cirrus clouds in a manner reminiscent of a Clyfford Still abstraction.

Although he initially gained recognition for his paintings placing common objects, such as milk bottles, against skies of heightened serenity, Goode has played with pure abstraction, photography, and collage throughout the past half-century. In his Photo Cloud series, Goode floats imagery of fictional photographs depicting clouds within his chatoyant renderings of atmosphere. These floating images suggest both scale and orientation within an image that otherwise confounds the viewer’s perception of both. He then envelops the canvas in a Plexiglas frame, creating three converging realities that, as critic Michael Duncan notes, flaunt their own artificiality. These three overlapping universes – the imaginary stories behind each painted photo, the luminous sky, and the bodies and objects reflected by the Plexiglass frame – result in three worlds existing in the same place, at the same time.

Joe Goode has participated in over 100 solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. His work resides in the permanent collections of dozens of prominent museum collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K.