The Practice + Theory series is sponsored in part by the Frances Dittmer Family Foundation.

Untitled, 2006, latex enamel on paper with cardboard roll, dimensions variable.

Joe Zucker has consistently for over four decades been one of America’s most innovative artists. His paintings are personal, quirky, idiosyncratic, and often puzzling. His style is rooted in processes, some simple, others remarkably complex. His imagery most often relates in some way to the materials and processes (for example, cotton plantation imagery executed in cotton balls rolled in paint). He has made paintings that include the tools that made them integrated into the works themselves and illustrate the use of those tools as part of the imagery. He has made paintings in which the paint is not applied to canvas or any other ground, but literally floats in space—the medium purely being itself. Pouring, squeezing and manipulating paint, he fashions paintings so personal it would be impossible to imagine anyone else having made them. This is the definition of personal invention.

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Issue 100 Summer 2007