CATALPA BOOGIE

JOSEPH HART

EXHIBITION DATES:
MARCH 14 - APRIL 27, 2024

Romer Young Gallery is excited to present Catalpa Boogie, a solo exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Joseph Hart. The show will be on view March 14th through April 20, 2024, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 14th, from 5:00 - 8:00pm.

Reflecting on this body of work, Hart says, “It recently occurred to me that many of the aesthetic and conceptual kinks that I’m trying to work through in abstraction—abject beauty and grotesqueness, organizing pictorial space in a unique and graceful way, opposing forces, and how complicated our visual worlds and lives are—I can see versions of these ideas in the catalpa tree that grows next to our apartment building. Especially during Autumn when its foliage begins to thin out, exposing the tree’s super structure of limbs that cut up the sky like a wayward line drawing. Its over-sized heart-shaped leaves begin to curl, flop, and drop, revealing elongated and sinister looking seed pods. All the catalpa’s contours begin to twist, overlap, kiss, and fight each other only to fall away, eventually re-growing in a new configuration. It’s a bit saccharine but I appreciate the tension and elegance and poetry of it all, and I want to breathe some of that complexity and beauty into my artwork.”

Joseph Hart is a New York-based visual artist that makes drawings and paintings. He is also the founder and producer of Deep Color, the celebrated oral history project and podcast that features artists and arts professionals discussing their work, ideas, and lives. Hart’s artwork can be found in the public collections of the RISD Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Penland School of Craft and The City College of New York. Hart received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his partner and two children.

For additional information or sales inquires please email Joey Piziali, joey@romeryounggallery.com