PARIS.- Zander Galerie Paris is presenting a focused installation of two fire paintings by American artist Joe Goode (1937-2025). Created between 1982 and 2015, both works belong to the artist’s celebrated Forest Fire series, inspired by the dramatic skies and smoke of a devastating wildfire in California. Marking a pivotal moment in Goode’s career, these paintings reflect his enduring exploration of perception and the natural world, while revealing a deeply poetic response to one of nature’s most powerful and transformative forces.
Born in Oklahoma City in 1937, Joe Goode was a leading figure of the post-war Californian art scene. He moved to Los Angeles in 1959 to study at the Chouinard Art Institute, where he joined a generation of artists who challenged the legacy of Abstract Expressionism by turning their attention to the visual experience of everyday life. In 1962, Walter Hopps included Goode’s work in the landmark exhibition New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, alongside artists including Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha, in what is widely regarded as the first museum exhibition devoted to Pop Art in the United States. Among the works presented were Goode’s milk bottle paintings, in which real milk bottles were sometimes mounted on the painted surface, challenging the conventional two-dimensional picture plane. Although often associated with both Pop Art and the Light and Space movement, Goode developed a distinctly personal practice centered on the act of seeing itself. Throughout series such as the Cloud Paintings and Vandalism, he explored transparency, layered pictorial space and atmospheric phenomena, constantly questioning the relationship between perception and reality.
The Forest Fire series originated in 1982, after Goode witnessed the dramatic smoke and coloured skies caused by a wildfire near his home in Springville, California. Although he never saw the flames themselves, the shifting clouds of smoke and the changing hues of the sky left a profound impression on him, inspiring a body of work that he continued to explore for more than three decades. Rather than depicting fire as a purely destructive force, Goode approached it as a constantly evolving natural phenomenon and as part of a larger cycle of transformation and renewal. The subtle variations of colour reflect different stages and intensities of the fire, while the compositions evoke its movement, atmosphere and immaterial presence. More than representations of a landscape, these paintings invite viewers to experience the changing qualities of light, colour and space that define Joe Goode’s singular vision of the natural world. They also reveal his enduring pursuit of the essence of things.
Joe Goode’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. His work is held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Throughout his career, Goode has received numerous grants and awards, including support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the American Foundation of Artists.
Coinciding with the exhibition in Paris, Zander Galerie Cologne presents Torn Skies, a selection of large-scale paintings and works on paper spanning more than three decades of Joe Goode’s career. The exhibition is on view from 29 August through 30 October 2026.
