Literature

Joe Goode grew up next door to Ed Ruscha in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. Goode was determined to escape his hometown and pursue a career in art, and so in 1959, encouraged by Ruscha, he took his first ever plane flight and arrived in Los Angeles with $65 to his name.

In Los Angeles, Goode entered a rapidly developing contemporary art scene. He quickly became a key figure among a group of young artists—including Ken Price, Ed Kienholz and Ronald Davis among others—who were at the forefront of American Pop. To these artists, who embraced California’s burgeoning consumer culture as a subject for their work, the reproductive possibilities offered by the graphic image were appealing and many worked at the newly established Gemini Ltd.

In 1965, three years after his painting appeared in the seminal 1962 exhibition New painting of common objects at the Pasadena Art Museum, Goode worked at Gemini Ltd to create two prints entitled Cloud and Self-portrait. In 1967 Goode returned to Gemini (by now Gemini GEL) and made the English still-life series, in which a glass and a spoon—two banal everyday items—progressively shift around the composition. Two layers of varnish, one silver and one transparent, were screenprinted onto the prints, lending their surface a gentle lustre.

Emilie Owens