Photograph by David Moog and Burchfield Penney Art Center

Please join us for an evening with Joseph Radoccia as he discusses his exhibition ABOUT-FACE: 50 years after Stonewall.

Joseph Radoccia’s paintings have meandered from medium to medium but have always reflected his fascination with forms of intimacy. And continue to do so with his large portraits on paper.

His early art in Buffalo, NY were allegoric assemblages exploring the labyrinth of courtship. In the mid 80s after moving to Brooklyn, NY his painting, influenced by shadow of the AIDS epidemic, moved in into darkly narrative oil painting on panels about navigating sexual identity, love and fear. Several of these are included in the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art permanent and study collections.

Eventually he sought to free his work from personal and political driven themes so Radoccia abandoned the narrative to exclusively engage in an extended period of passive observational painting. Learning from looking listening and simply painting objects from life.

He left Brooklyn, traveled several times to Madagascar, and settled in Beacon, NY where as his practice matured his looking moved from objects to faces.  His current work is over-sized intricate portraiture, faces as maps of experience.

His work was recently on view at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, NY in their exhibition entitled Contemporary Portraiture. In September 2018 he held a solo exhibition in Kingston NY: Becoming Elders: Portraits of LGBTQ elders.

Joseph Radoccia received an MFA in Painting from the State University of New York at Buffalo.