Joe Sola’s heavily conceptual practice is concerned with the role of the artist as participant and recorder of political and cultural events. Through video, painting, and drawing he creates humorous critiques of consumerism, government, and the contemporary art world, exploring psychological concerns around easily recognizable people, objects, and events through both abstract and realist techniques. His parallel tendencies of drawing on the world around him for material and satirizing aspects of artistic practice have prompted comparison to John Baldessari and Richard Prince. In his video work some blood of an artist (2011), a male figure engages in brutal and violent acts of vivisection against a series of corpses, played by Sola and a latex lookalike of the artist, using the extracted body parts as material for various artworks.
Joe Sola’s heavily conceptual practice is concerned with the role of the artist as participant and recorder of political and cultural events. Through video, painting, and drawing he creates humorous critiques of consumerism, government, and the contemporary art world, exploring psychological concerns around easily recognizable people, objects, and events through both abstract and realist techniques. His parallel tendencies of drawing on the world around him for material and satirizing aspects of artistic practice have prompted comparison to John Baldessari and Richard Prince. In his video work some blood of an artist (2011), a male figure engages in brutal and violent acts of vivisection against a series of corpses, played by Sola and a latex lookalike of the artist, using the extracted body parts as material for various artworks.