{"id":14581,"date":"2019-12-15T08:48:04","date_gmt":"2019-12-15T13:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=14581"},"modified":"2019-12-15T08:48:04","modified_gmt":"2019-12-15T13:48:04","slug":"joe-coleman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2019\/12\/15\/joe-coleman\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Coleman\u2019s Visionary Icons Of Outlaws And Depraved Souls"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joe Coleman\u2019s paintings of outlaws and depraved souls can bring to mind sordid circus sideshow banners, holy medieval manuscript illumination, narrative murals, 1960s underground comics, and the obsessive ravings of a madman.<\/p>\n

His icons are feverishly dense with detail, pictures, words, loads of information. He renders his portraits in acrylic on wood panels with tiny paintbrushes, all those fine brushstrokes adding up to a visionary hyper-reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery time I start a new work, I\u2019m digging for more and more information,\u201d Coleman told The Quietus in 2016. \u201cMy digging is done with the finest brushes but also, it\u2019s much like an archaeological dig inside of me because it\u2019s bringing out things that are inside so that they appear on the surface.”<\/p>\n

\u201cJoe Coleman and the Shadow Self\u201d\u2014at Andrew Edlin Gallery in New York<\/a> from Oct. 25 to Dec. 21, 2019\u2014offers a 25-year survey of the Brooklyn painter\u2019s art via 17 artworks.<\/p>\n

\"Joe<\/a>
Joe Coleman’s “The Holy Saint Adolf II [Adolf W\u00f6lfli],” 1995, acrylic on panel. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>Coleman\u2019s subjects include John Brown, the Civil War-era abolitionist vigilante; Carlo Gesualdo, the medieval composer who murdered his wife and her lover; Swift Runner, a Cree hunter who cannibalized his family; Adolf Wolfi, the convicted child molester, Swiss psychiatric hospital patient and visionary artist; and Adam Parfrey, whose Feral House publishing company was an outlet for the \u201cdegenerate\u201d and forbidden and underground, from Nazi Joseph Goebbel\u2019s novel \u201cMichael\u201d to the 1987 anthology of essays on \u201cApocalypse Culture\u201d (with a cover image by Coleman).<\/p>\n

\u201cI spared neither sex nor age. How many times I dyed my hands in human blood, I do not know,\u201d Coleman quotes Albert Hicks in his painting of the murder and gangster, who was hung in New York in 1860 for piracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the characters I paint, I feel were people who represent a true part of America that isn\u2019t taught in history, but should be,\u201d Coleman told The Quietus in 2016<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe stories that I\u2019m telling are the stories that are truly important,\u201d Coleman told Susanne Pfeffer<\/a> for a 2007 Berlin exhibition. \u201cThe stories about St. Sebastian and St. Peter that you see \u2026 are just quaint for a modern audience. They don\u2019t have any real teeth, no real balls for a modern society. \u2026 I think serial killers are really saint-like. They are shamans that go into these dark places. They are like these rugged individuals of the old American mythology such as John Dillinger and Jesse James. But they are much farther into the abyss.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy intention,\u201d Coleman told Stay Thirsty in 2016<\/a>, \u201cis just to find the humanity in the worst of humanity or just to find \u2018what is humanity?\u2019”<\/p>\n

\"Joe<\/a>
Joe Coleman with his 2010 painting “A Doorway to Joe” at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, Dec. 6, 2019. (Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The exhibition also offers portraits of Coleman himself and the leggy blonde photographer Whitney Ward, his \u201cwife and muse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coleman was born in 1955 and grew up in Norwalk, Conn. He emerged in New York\u2019s downtown arts scene of the 1970’s and 80’s as a performance artist (including “party explosions”) then painter.<\/p>\n

When I bumped into Coleman in the gallery recently, he sported a goatee beard, suit and a waistcoat adorned with medals, skulls, claws, a depiction of a Feejee mermaid. He seemed like a magician crossed with P.T. Barnum crossed with\u00a0a gone-to-seed Civil War colonel.<\/p>\n

His Brooklyn home has been known as the home of his Odditorium, \u201ca private museum where sideshow objects, wax figures, crime artifacts and works of religious devotion live together to form a dark mirror that reflects the alternative side of the American psyche,\u201d according to his website.<\/p>\n

”It gives you a way to possess your fears,” Coleman told The New York Times in 1999, ”in the same way that primitive tribes will make fetish objects. A hundred years from now, my collection might give an indication of our fears and obsessions and perversions and lusts and anger. It preserves these things that are inside all of us right now.”<\/p>\n

Some sources:<\/strong>
\n\u2022 William Hamilton, \u201cAT HOME WITH — Joe Coleman; Saints and Monsters,\u201d The New York Times, Aug. 26, 1999.
\n\u2022 Sean Kitching, \u201cA Devil With The Detail: Joe Coleman Interviewed,\u201d<\/a> The Quietus, May 29, 2016.
\n\u2022 Sarah Myers, \u201cA Conversation with Painter, Performer and Collector Joe Coleman,\u201d<\/a> Stay Thirsty, October 2016.
\n\u2022 Susanne Pfeffer, \u201cInterview with Joe Coleman,\u201d<\/a> for exhibition at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany, 2007.<\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\"Joe<\/a>
Joe Coleman’s “A Doorway to Joe,” 2010, acrylic on wood panel. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Joe<\/a>
Joe Coleman’s “The Book of Revelations,” 1999, acrylic on panel, collaged with bloodstained miniature Bible pages. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Joe<\/a>
Joe Coleman’s “The Book of Revelations, Take Two,” 2019, acrylic on wood panel with painted frame and fabric. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Detail<\/a>
Detail of Joe Coleman’s “The Book of Revelations, Take Two,” 2019, acrylic on wood panel with painted frame and fabric. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Joe<\/a>
Joe Coleman’s “A Doorway to Whitney,” 2015, acrylic on wood panel. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"Detail<\/a>
Detail of Joe Coleman’s “The Holy Saint Adolf II [Adolf W\u00f6lfli],” 1995, acrylic on panel. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\"Detail<\/a>
Detail of Joe Coleman’s “The Holy Saint Adolf II [Adolf W\u00f6lfli],” 1995, acrylic on panel. (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joe Coleman\u2019s paintings of outlaws and depraved souls can bring to mind sordid circus sideshow banners, holy medieval manuscript illumination, narrative murals, 1960s underground comics, and the obsessive ravings of a madman. His icons are feverishly dense with detail, pictures, words, loads of information. He renders his portraits in acrylic on wood panels with tiny […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14586,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[649,584],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14581"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14596,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14581\/revisions\/14596"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}