Josh Dorman: Lost Divers

Posted by Maximum Fun on 25th September 2011

An artist named Josh Dorman emailed me from New York a month or two ago. He told me that he used to listen to music while he worked, but he’d spent the past few months listening to nothing but The Sound of Young America.

Podcasts are popular among those working in visual fields, especially lonely ones where people work solo and crave human voices. I do get an email like this from time to time, and it’s always nice to hear. Not usually, though, am I so struck by the work. Dorman’s paintings are beautiful, a sort of visual wunderkammer, with archaic illustration aesthetics and painting techniques getting all mixed up with maps and print and gorgeous palettes.

His show, Lost Divers, runs for about another month at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. They’re at 527 W. 26th St., and they’re open pretty regular hours. I wish I was in NYC so I could take a look in person.