Joe Sorren
Joe Sorren’s paintings depict stylized, cartoonish characters in dreamlike settings that evoke the “lowbrow” art or Pop Surrealism movement of 1970s Los Angeles. Working in a muted, but luminous, palette, Sorren creates layer upon layer of texture with oil paint upon his canvas until creatures and landscapes somehow captured by emotion emerge with impressionistic brushstrokes, as if from the dreamscape of the Artist’s imagination. Sorren draws inspiration for his paintings from human behavior, classic moments that he puts a cynical spin on, like The Immaculate Conception, and his own experiences from a complicated life. “Since painting is a physical record of movement in time,” Sorren has said, “brushstrokes are not unlike the grooves on a vinyl record—capturing not just the color and shape of a stroke, but the timbre; the energy and emotion experienced at the time it was painted.” Sorren was born in 1970 in Chicago. He earned a BFA from Northern Arizona University in 1993. For the past 17 years since, he has shown his artwork in multiple exhibitions in galleries and museums in the United States and abroad. His artwork has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, TIME and Rolling Stone.
