BO JOSEPH’s (b. 1969, California) work is distinguished by a complex and labor-intensive process that he has developed over the years, which begins with a selection of images culled from his vast archive of catalogs, personal photographs and books. In both Joseph’s cast bronze sculptures and joined paper pieces, the selected souvenirs are visually stripped of normal reference points and distilled into solid shapes. In the paintings on paper, outlines of these shapes are drawn multiple times in vivid oil pastels onto various layers of paper. Other recent works include a series of wall reliefs in a new technique developed by the artist. These graphic sculptures achieve their rich patina from casein, a medium made with milk protein with 11th-century origins. Joseph cites Louise Bourgeois and Joseph Beuys as profound influences not only on form and color choices, but also on the use of recontextualization to extract the charge from found sources.
Joseph was born in 1969 in Berkeley, CA, moving with artistically inclined parents between Oakland, Los Angeles, Paris and San Francisco, where exposure to cultural and ideological diversity laid the groundwork for life as a visual thinker. Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1992 with a BFA in Painting, Joseph has received awards and honors such as the Basil H. Alkazzi Award, and fellowships in painting from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He has been a visiting artist/lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, Parsons and Pace University, New York, Ewha Womans Univeristy, Seoul, Korea, and the Rhode Island School of Design where he also taught drawing. His work can be found in museums including the RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Zillman Art Museum, University of Maine, Bangor; The Springfield Museum of Art, OH; and the Guilin Art Museum, China. Joseph has exhibited in institutions, art fairs and galleries across the US and abroad, including the RISD Museum, Providence; Brooklyn Museum; Springfiled Museum of Art, OH; Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs; McClain Gallery, Houston; Lee Eugean Gallery, Seoul; and Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, among others. His work has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, Art in America and Architectural Digest, and has been a subject on NYCTV and National Public Radio. Bo Joseph has had four solo exhibitions at McClain Gallery, the most recent titled Holding Spaces in 2023. The artist's sculptural work was included in McClain Gallery’s 2018 exhibition re:construction and in their booth at the Dallas Art Fair in 2019. Bo Joseph lives and works in New York and Brooklyn.