Joe Goode, a mercurial artist whose more than six-decade career began in the fledgling contemporary art scene of 1960s Southern California, died at his Los Angeles home at the age of 87 on Saturday, March 22, one day before his 88th birthday. The news of his passing was confirmed by Michael Kohn Gallery, which has represented the artist in LA since 2011. 

It’s both, Joe Goode’s art answered as the 1960s began — something surely material but purely visual. And something else besides, something curious and engaging that you haven’t ever seen before. In his strongest work, the Los Angeles-based artist — who died of natural causes in his sleep on March 22, a day before his 88th birthday — held the image and the object in eccentric equipoise. The result is an uncanny sense of vivid presence.

Joe Goode, a painter who counted as a core figure of the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, died on March 22 at his home in Los Angeles at 87. He would have turned 88 the following day. Michael Kohn Gallery and Zander Galerie, Goode’s representatives in LA and Cologne, respectively, announced his death this week but did not specify a cause.

Sea of Desire
June 2 - November 4, 2018
at Porquerolles Island
Curated by Dieter Buchhart

A group exhibition Sandro Botticelli, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Joe Goode and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Laughing on the Outside: Selections from the Permanent Collection presents artworks from MOCA’s collection that register the ludicrous, the impossible, and the playful. On view are stairs that lead to nowhere, invitations to exhibitions that contain no objects, and boots that appear to walk by themselves.

There are a pair of chimerical blue orbs by Lita Albuquerque, an early study of boxy green forms by seminal Modernist Josef Albers and a series of monochromatic paintings by Félix González-Torres that depict the colors of the Palestinian flag — a sequence of white, green, red and black that was once outlawed by Israel.

Artists of Color is The Underground Museum’s third exhibition curated by our co-founder Noah Davis. It presents color-driven work in the form of monochrome, hard-edge and color field painting, sculpture and immersive installations.  The show includes works by artists Joe Goode, Josef Albers, Michael Asher, Dan Flavin, Carmen Herrera, Jennie C. Jones, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Diana Thater, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Lita Albuquerque and more. 

Color is a building block of artistic practice and our own aesthetic experiences. Artists of all mediums use color to express shapes, light, mood and emotion. Think about the specific shades that represent serenity, nobility, energy, or purity. Color is also used by people and political movements to define culture and countries. It can make visible the often unseen connection between our bodies and the cosmos.

Our hope is that through this show you develop your own relationship to color. That together we expand the dialogue around color theory. That you take new notice of how colors interact with each other, both on the canvas and in life.

I WAS ALWAYS AWARE THAT MY WORK WASN’T POP. And Walter Hopps knew it too, even though he included me in the Pasadena Art Museum’s “New Painting of Common Objects” in 1962. I had the attitude of, I don’t care where you show me as long as you show me. It’s not very often I choose to revisit a series I’ve done before.

One of Joe Goode’s fond memories of the New York art scene of the '60s was when the great Andy Warhol invited him to dinner at “my favorite restaurant.”  Goode, who was then so poor he had hitchhiked to Manhattan, was dazzled. Would it be Grenouille or maybe the Cote Basque, where Truman Capote nestled among  his entourage of millionaire fashionistas?