Joe Zucker

Interior Box & Lid

2005

In the 1970s, Joe Zucker experimented with what has become his signature technique: gluing cotton balls to canvas in a gridded arrangement and painting over them. Resulting in a highly textured surface reminiscent of mosaic, this technique radically transforms the surface of the canvas and challenges the “flatness” that critics like Clement Greenberg championed as essential to the discipline of painting. In his compositions, Zucker constructs simplified geometric renderings of subjects like houses and sailboats, where the subject matter serves only a vehicle for the artist’s exploration of formal qualities. In his series of "Box Paintings" made in 2004-05, Zucker constructed shallow wooden boxes with various compartments into which he poured a single color of enamel, resulting in flat areas of color that allude to the ideals of modernist painting.