Joe Amrhein

Born 1953 in Sacramento/CA, lives and works in Brooklyn/NY

Galleries:
Dogenhaus Galerie, Leipzig
Durham Press, Durham/PA
Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco/CA






Joe Amrhein has a unique position in the New York City art world. He is the owner of Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which began as an experimental and freewheeling artist-run gallery in 1994, and has since become a beloved and enormously influential venue with broad international recognition. Amrhein is also an accomplished artist with a flourishing career; he is both a visionary gallerist and a trailblazing artist known for idiosyncratic and visually stunning combinations of painting, signage, and found texts. While lots of acclaimed gallerists began their careers as artists, very few have maintained their artwork as a driving force over time. 

Amrhein’s own background in California as an expert commercial sign painter inspires his work. He collects fragments of found texts, for instance hyperbolic phrases from published art reviews, essays, and articles; paints them by hand on different materials (notably Mylar), and then arranges these multiple panels in overlapping layers on the wall. In Willing Suspension of Disbelief, 2009, the title cites the famous dictum on fiction and art coined by British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817; this is then translated into several languages, making for a polyglot work that addresses how we both see and describe art, and also connects to Amrhein’s dual roles as artist and gallerist. One can literally read Amrhein’s works, but only partially, because of the way words and phrases adjoin and blend, yet they also have a tremendous visual power, with all their shapes, vibrant colors, and shifting fonts. Amrhein’s textual fragments and phrases (along with numbers, currency symbols, and place names) suggest the information overload of the present day, but also make reference to nineteenth-century circus posters, early to mid-twentieth-century amusement park signage, and decades-old advertisements on building facades.

 

Exhibitions | Bibliography

Exhibitions:
2008: Perpetual If (Information Friction), Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (with Ati Maier)
2007–08: Red Dot Contemporary, West Palm Beach/FL
2007: Bare Words, Lautom Contemporary, Oslo

Bibliography:
Perpetual If (Information Friction), with a conversation between Joe Amrhein and Ati Maier, exh. cat. Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg 2008
Hans-Adelbert von Karweik, “Worte zerbersten in Scherben,” in Wolfsburg Kultur, September 12, 2008
Stephen Maine, “Letter by Letter, Word by Word,” in The New York Sun, June 21, 2007
Christopher Miles, “Finding a Good Use for Art-speak,” in Los Angeles Times, October 7, 2005