Joe Amrhein
Joe Amrhein is the founder and director of Pierogi gallery and The Boiler in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and is an active visual artist as well. Known for its inventive program, Pierogi was launched eighteen years ago. Pierogi exhibits the work of contemporary emerging and mid-career artists in a wide variety of media; from drawing and painting, to sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Amrhein is a painter who works mainly with text on a variety of media, including translucent vellum and glass. The artist says of his practice, “My work is a combination of different disciplines— physically, it comes out of painting but the context is conceptual. I use language, text, and font icons as my primary subject with reference to sign painting, which gives this language scale and vitality and comes out of my background as a sign painter. The materials I paint on, glass and vellum, besides being traditional surfaces for signs, give me the option to develop the text with a metaphorical content—notions of density, fracturing, memory and shadows as ephemera, among others.
Amrhein has exhibited widely in the US and Europe including Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, Jochen Hempel Galerie, Berlin, Germany, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany, Leytonstone Center …
Joe Amrhein is the founder and director of Pierogi gallery and The Boiler in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and is an active visual artist as well. Known for its inventive program, Pierogi was launched eighteen years ago. Pierogi exhibits the work of contemporary emerging and mid-career artists in a wide variety of media; from drawing and painting, to sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Amrhein is a painter who works mainly with text on a variety of media, including translucent vellum and glass. The artist says of his practice, “My work is a combination of different disciplines— physically, it comes out of painting but the context is conceptual. I use language, text, and font icons as my primary subject with reference to sign painting, which gives this language scale and vitality and comes out of my background as a sign painter. The materials I paint on, glass and vellum, besides being traditional surfaces for signs, give me the option to develop the text with a metaphorical content—notions of density, fracturing, memory and shadows as ephemera, among others.
Amrhein has exhibited widely in the US and Europe including Yossi Milo Gallery, New York, Jochen Hempel Galerie, Berlin, Germany, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany, Leytonstone Center for Contemporary Art, UK, and The Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College, Collegeville, PA, among others.
Courtesy of the Artist