* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Joe Fig earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts.
Through his paintings and sculptures of artists and their studios, Joe offers recreated or imagined, and perhaps romanticized, peeks of the “artist at work”. By depicting artists—including Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh, Barnett Newman, and April Gornik—in the throes and environs of creative production, Fig expounds his view of studio itself as a portrait of the artist. For Inside the Painter’s Studio (2009), he painstakingly recreated artists’ studios (with the artists inside) as “table sculptures” or maquettes, pairing photographs of the dioramas, interviews with the artists describing their processes, and documentary snapshots of the artists at work.