JOE COLEMAN

Coleman’s portraits create complete biographies by surrounding their subjects with interweavings of miniscule images and explanatory text. Artist and viewer embark on exploratory excavations of the subject’s life through the painting. Coleman’s jewel-box approach means that one experiences the paintings afresh at each viewing, uncovering ever more details and nuances that were previously undetected. An admirer of Northern artists such as Bosch, Brueghel and Grunewald, Coleman employs the same attention to detail and delicate sense of scale, utilizing dual and single haired brushes in conjunction with magnifying lenses to create his refined masterpieces. Like those artists, Coleman also displays a propensity for the gruesome and grisly and often attempts to both dissect and glorify the terrible in many of his paintings, unmasking with brutal honesty the truth of human nature.
Joe Coleman has shown his work extensively since the mid-1980s, beginning with exhibitions in the East Village at galleries like Limbo, Civilian Warfare, and Chronoside. His paintings have been part of the exhibitions The End is Near! at the American Visionary Museum, Baltimore, Cult Rapture at The Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, and Brooklyn/718 at the Palm Beach Museum of Contemporary Art. Coleman‘s work was also included in Hieronymus Bosch 1450-1516 at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and Kunstwerke Berlin presented the comprehensive retrospective Internal Digging in 2007.