Joe Sorren was born in 1970 in Chicago and he grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona. He began painting in 1989 and, in 1993, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Northern Arizona University and worked as creative director for Transworld Snowboarding Magazine.
After a long-term residency in New York City, Sorren spent a few years in Florence and in Barcelona, where he had the chance to absorb both Italian and Spanish art vibes.
The artist’s poetic imagery, his fading landscapes, peculiar brushstrokes and unique codes, make him one of the leading figures on the scene of the American cultural avant-garde of Pop Surrealism of which he is a prime mover.
Contemporary master of “emotion lighting”, Sorren paints with muted, but luminous, palette and golden-like oil colours that make the viewer feel transported into the realm of the canvas, a warm wool of soft textures. Sorren’s brushstrokes are like sunbeams that penetrate the foggy atmosphere of an ever-spring realm. His style is hyper-contemporary and hyper-impressionistic at the same time, a feature that characterises his signature touch of colour and makes his art widely recognisable worldwide.
Sorren creates layer upon layer of texture with oil paint upon his canvas until creatures and sceneries somehow captured by extreme emotion emerge with impressionistic brushstrokes, as if from the deepest meanderings of the Artist’s imagination. Sorren’s inspiration for his paintings comes from human behaviours, classic moments that he turns into romantic, everlasting fractions of time. “Since painting is a physical record of movement in time”, Sorren affirms, “brushstrokes are not unlike the grooves on a vinyl record-capturing not just the colour and shape of a stroke, but the timbre; the energy and emotion experienced at the time it was painted”.
Sorren allows his artworks to evolve sensitivity naturally and subconsciously. The process of study and realisation may take even years and each new layer of paint, reflects the subject’s spiritual metamorphosis into new beings. A figure may develop into a hill or in a landscape; or perhaps a tree may morph into a human being. Mysterious creatures enclosed in their inaccessible ocean and absorbed into their simultaneously melancholic and joyful state, populate Joe Sorren’s large size paintings, which examine the wonders of nature and of the human spirit.
Always playing with new forms and palette, Sorren highlights the tender faces and gestures of his inimitable figures and generates his unique, living fairytales. By recording feelings of joy, he creates something like a sweet symphony coming out of our ordinary moments, which ultimately realises an idealistic freeze-frame belonging to modern life. Sorren’s emotional subjects are remarkably moving and able to step us back into the memorable and timeless serenity of childhood.
His artworks have appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Time and Rolling Stone and he has worked with media companies such as Warner Bros, Fox, and NBC. During the last 15 years, he has shown his artworks in solo exhibitions in galleries and museums both in the United States and abroad. In 2010, Sorren was featured in the exhibitions “Art from the New World” at the Bristol City Museum, and “Pop Surrealism,” held at the Museum of Visual Arts Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, Italy curated by Dorothy Circus Gallery during the “Festival dei Due Mondi”.
