Joe Coleman (born November 22, 1955) is an American painter, illustrator and performance artist.
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He was born Joseph Coleman, Jr. in Norwalk, Connecticut to a World War II-veteran father and the daughter of a professional prizefighter.[1]
Coleman is best known for intricately detailed portraits of subjects both famous and infamous: artists, outlaws, serial killers, movies stars, friends, and family. He paints with a single-hair brush and uses a jewelers loupe; much of the detail is not visible to the naked eye. The majority of his portraits portray the central subject in the center of the canvas, lozenges containing biographical scenes and details from the subject's life ring the central image.
His work draws as much from Coleman's beginnings as a comic book artist as from historical precedents. His paintings are most often compared to those of Hieronymus Bosch, and his work has been exhibited alongside canvases by the Dutch master.[2]
In 2006, Coleman had a retrospective at New York's Jack Tilton Gallery entitled "Joe Coleman: 30 Paintings and a Selection from the Odditorium", curated by Steven Holmes. The following year he had one-man shows at two major European museums, in Paris at the Palais de Tokyo, and "Joe Coleman Internal Digging" at Berlin's KW Institut. In 2008, New York's Dickinson Gallery exhibited Coleman's work together with "Devotio Moderno: Joe Coleman/Northern Primitives" paintings by Hans Memling and other 15th century early Netherlandish painters.
Among people who own Coleman's paintings are such luminaries as Iggy Pop, Johnny Depp, Jim Jarmusch, Leonardo DiCaprio and H.R.Giger.
Coleman's work has been featured on the covers of many books including:
His pranks — including appearing to blow himself up and medieval-style geek antics — have been documented in the Pranks! volume of RE/Search, along with the works of some of his contemporaries such as Boyd Rice.
Coleman is an avid enthusiast for weird, dark American culture and a serious collector of sideshow oddities. He's a patron of Johnny Fox's Freakatorium in New York City (where he lives) and was a supporter and good friend of the late rockabilly eccentric Hasil Adkins. He also acted in Black Hearts Bleed Red, a 1992 film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's short story A Good Man Is Hard To Find, made by New York independent film director Jeri Cain Rossi, and also in Scarlet Diva, Asia Argento's 2003 film debut as director.