Joe Zane

Excerpt from press release:

Joe Zane is a conceptual artist of a new stripe, with a great sense of humor that belies the serious intellectual rigor of his work. In this show, Zane presents a cohesive installation that explores many facets of authenticity and authorship in contemporary art making, and looks at how the artist’s persona becomes an object marketed along with the rest of the artwork produced. It includes oil paintings, colored pencil drawings, printed matter, an audio component, and some sculpture, all tightly focused on the topic at hand.
In this exhibition, Zane present several interrelated bodies of work, including a series of paintings inspired by his study of the lives of famous forgers, whose visages have been reproduced in beautiful oil on canvas by anonymous artists working at a mass production paintings house in China. A small wall label identifying the area of expertise of the counterfeiter accompanies each portrait.

These are sculptures of neon signs of my name. They are sculpted to looks like working neons, although they do not light up. They act as a pathetic stand in for the real thing.

On March 18, 1990 two men dressed in security uniforms robbed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of thirteen priceless artworks. To this day, it remains the biggest art theft in U.S. history. Five of the artworks stolen were paintings by the artists Vermeer, Rembrandt, Flinck, and Manet. For this body of work, a company in China was commissioned to reproduced the paintings. It is an attempt to reclaim the images as a form of restitution.

This is a small edition of handmade Phaidon press monographs with myself as the subject. Five books were printed and handbound. Contributing authors included, artists, Julia Scher and Joe Gibbons.

These images are part of a series of portraits of art forgers. Each painting was produced by a company in China, based on photographs of the forger that were sent via email.