Joe Goode’s work has had national prominence since his 1962 Milk Bottle series was featured in New Painting of Common Objects at the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art. He has explored the fluid interrelation between representation and abstraction—Goode’s concern with the vernacular embraces abstract works as a perpetuation of this core framework of encounters with the everyday. Bakersfield has affinity with his slightly earlier Ozone series, which emphasized chemical interactions of vivdli-colored paint and a variety of liquid thinners. Goode’s work is in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, The Walker Art Center, Orange County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and LACMA.
Milk bottles have been a recurring theme in Goode’s work, and in his latest project with Cirrus, Double Feature, the ubiquitous form is dramatically staged with one of a series of photographs the artist has taken of hotel-room curtains.