Joe Zucker - Tapa dura

Joe Zucker has flown under the radar of larger public awareness due to the frequent transformations in his art from one style to another, and thus his work has not been easily characterized and identified. Nevertheless, he has forged a powerful artistic persona as a process artist with a certain pop inflection, who not only grapples with formal and theoretical concerns but also explores themes of history, culture and Americana.

This career-spanning survey deals with all of Joe Zucker’s various bodies of work, from his grid paintings of the 1960s to his latest pieces, including the monumental 1000 Brushstrokes (2015–1016). Zucker’s art is rooted in a conceptual framework where tools, materials, processes, procedures, content and subject matter are all interrelated.Working with materials ranging from cotton balls, sash cord, peg board and squeegees to acrylic and rhoplex, and exploring such themes as the grid, the history of cotton, ancient civilizations, an assortment of ‘dubious characters’, paintings that paint themselves, as well as meditations on the studio, Zucker merges materials, process and content – abstract and otherwise – to produce compelling works of extraordinary inventiveness, irony and passion.

Table of Contents

Three Sides of Joe Zucker, and his Homemade Aesthetics · Image and Surface: Joe Zucker’s
Painterly Approach to Process, Alex Bacon · In the Land of Cotton: Look Away, Look Away
· The Ancient World – Artchaic · ‘Grid Lock’, or A Bad Case of the Grids · Dubious
Characters · Fish and Fowl, Feather and Scale · The Seven Seas: First the Tide Rushes in
and Plants a Kiss on the Shore then Rolls... Out to Sea... · Let’s Get Ready to Rumble ·
The American Heartland: Willa Catherized · Process: Paintings as Tools That Help Make
Themselves · Views From The Houses of Pain and Pleasure! · Painting as [re]Model: Joe
Zucker’s 100-foot-long Piece Says It’s Time For Change Again, Terry R. Myers · Phong Bui Interview

John Elderfield is Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum; and a consultant at Gagosian Gallery. Alex Bacon is a scholar, writer and curator, who is currently finishing his PhD in art history at Princeton University. Terry R. Myers is Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Phong Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and co-founder, editor in chief, and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail.