“I am drawn to the dual quality that very large drawings contain; namely a sense of epic grandeur and at the same time a sense of intimacy that the drawn mark inevitably carries.

I am most interested in charged human situations. This interest is reflected through various means; sometimes by portraying a particular moment or event, but more often by showing the moment before or after an action which is only partially named or specified. I'm more interested in the suggestion of narrative possibilities than in clearly resolved linear narratives, though it seems important that certain details (i.e. gestures, expressions, clothing, object types) remain quite specific.

A major theme running through all the new work is a poetic collision between beauty and the (sometimes cruel) absurdity of the contemporary world. This collision produces a variety of situations, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime, all of which reveal a vulnerable sense of humanity.”
                     - Joe Biel

 
 

Rendered with extreme care and fidelity, Joe Biel’s practice, consisting mostly of drawing, transcends its own medium and objecthood, and especially those of its many subjects. Biel presents an accounting of our heroes, fears, and intersecting histories through chanced-upon cultural fragments. Biel’s mind is grafted to the viewer’s; his viewed experiences and memories become a commons, proof of something shared, for better and worse, amid calcified attitudes of siloed individuality and tribalism.

Biel’s research ranges from the instantly iconic to the murkily obscure. Towering Hollywood heroes, anime stills, advertising fragments, and artworks shoulder up with killers, disasters, and the largely disremembered. Biel’s clarifying eye has an abstracting, democratizing effect: Hannibal Lecter and the Ayatola somehow occupy the same brain-space, along with Neal Cassidy, Robert Rauschenberg, and a solar eclipse. “The medium is the message”, said pioneering media theorist Marshall McLuhan: that the television exists matters more than what’s shown on it–which, of course, is nearly everything. Biel’s work, making its depicted mediums envious, jolts and excites even as it numbs, offering the palliative comforts of shared anxiety.

Joe Biel (b. 1966, Boulder, CO) received an MFA in Painting from the University of Michigan and is currently on the faculty at California State University, Fullerton. His work has been exhibited in galleries nationally and internationally at Moskowitz Bayse, LA Louver Gallery, Roberts and Tilton Gallery, Acuna-Hansen Gallery, JAUS, and Angles Gallery in Los Angeles, Goff + Rosenthal Gallery, and Schema Projects in New York, Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, and Galerie Kuckei/Kuckei in Berlin. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Otis College of Art and Design and the Torrance Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna, CA , the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT and Diverseworks in Houston, TX. He has been awarded residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE, at the 18th St Arts Center in Santa Monica and at the Ballingallen Foundation in Ballycastle, Ireland. He was the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award in 2003 and in 2008. He lives and works in Los Angeles.