Joe Fleming

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Artist CV

Joe Fleming’s artistic practice engages deeply with the pervasive influence of Hollywood and mass media on contemporary culture. Working across a range of mediums, including painting, video, and digital art, Fleming blurs the boundaries between the hand-made and the mechanical. His dynamic mark-making merges manual gesture with machine precision, creating a compelling interplay between figure and ground within a modernist framework.

His paintings are particularly striking in their ability to manipulate light: layered surfaces allow illumination to pass through, casting shifting shadows onto the wall and activating the space beyond the painting. The resulting works are visually rich and conceptually layered, combining abstracted, animated imagery with a critical exploration of identity, mass production, political unrest, and transformation.

Joe Fleming’s career spans over two decades, marked by numerous solo exhibitions internationally in galleries in major cities, including Singapore, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and New York City. Fleming has lectured at universities in Canada, the United States, and South East Asia since 1993. His paintings are included in numerous public and private collections, such as BMO Financial Group, Trimark Mutual Funds, Honeywell Bull, Prince Waterhouse Coopers (Malaysia), HSBC Bank, A.T. Tolley Collection, Australian High Commission, Canadian High Commission (Kuala Lumpur), the Art Gallery of Edmonton, the Museum of Civilization (Hull, Quebec), and the Holocaust Museum (LA). Fleming has participated in several international art fairs, including Art Stage (Singapore), FIAC (Paris), Arte Cologne (Germany), Scope (New York and Miami), Art Miami, Papier (Montreal), and TIAF (Toronto). His work has been featured in a variety of publications, such as Carte Blanche 2: Painting - a survey of new Canadian painting (The Magenta Foundation), 60 Painters in Canada, The Artist’s Studio (by Joseph Hartman), American Illustration, Imago Mundi, Design Lines Magazine, Azure Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Now Magazine, CBC, Chelsea Now, and The Wall Street Journal Magazine.

Exhibition: Silver Harley, June 8 - July 18, 2019

ARTORONTO.CA by Mikael Sandblom

Fugitive Pigment by Earl Miller

The Escape Club, exhibition review Artoronto

Reviews of Suckerpunch, solo exhibition @ Mike Weiss Gallery NYC, 2014:

Wall Street International Magazine Review

Now Chelsea Review

The Artblog Review

AMNY review

interview with Studio Beat

Excerpt from exhibition text “The Escape Club” by Graham Gillmore, Nov. 2017

“But it is paintings’ potential, as well as it’s exhausted past that makes these images resonate, giving them their bloodline, as they coerce history into fantasy. If the shock of the new has been demoted to modernity, Fleming’s paintings strive for irreverent sophistication without tagging the Mona Lisa with a moustache.”

R.M. Vaughan June 23, 2012

“Fleming uses construction scraps and found objects to create short but very thick pile-ups that leap off the wall. Then he slathers his hoardings with gobs and bucket wallops of candy bright paint. Weirdly, this messy sounding scheme results in works that betray a ruined elegance, the allure of the dishevelled (what is known in club culture as being a “hot mess”) – all of which makes me suspect that despite the outward slap-dash action, Fleming is a highly calculating painter.”

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