Draft:Joseph Santore

Joseph Santore was born on December 15, 1945 in South Philadelphia. He completed his BFA at the Philadelphia College of Art in 1969, and his MFA at Yale University in 1973. He has received multiple awards and fellowships from some of the following organizations: American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fund Fellowship Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Santore's paintings belong to the permanent collection's of some of the following institutions: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cincinnati Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Tucson Museum of Art.

Career
Following his MFA, Santore predominately worked in an Abstract style, and his paintings were marked by their grand size and highly gestural, polychromatic brush strokes. As his career progressed, his works continued to possess an outward, and boisterous frequency of line and brushstroke. By the later half of the 1980s and the early 1990s, Santore started to introduce figurative and still life aspects into his paintings - a pursuit that has blossomed to become hallmarks of his painting style and interests. In tandem with this shift in his painterly focus, Santore was selected to participate in The Whitney Biennial in 1991, that was curated by Richard Armstrong, John G. Hanhardt, Richard Marshall, and Lisa Phillips. His work, "Yellow Painting" completed between 1989-99 was exhibited alongside works by Mike Kelley and Donald Lipski.

More recently, his work has become more self-referential and a-temporal, painting with oils, drawing with pencil and charcoal, and watercolors as well (exclusively using them for a period of time, which the artist describes as, “an exciting and strange journey”), the surface of his canvases and paper ebb and flow. They beguile the viewer and produce a mélange of inspired, detailed mark marking, and broad, aqueous and chromatic strokes. Santore’s work overflows with pathos and contradictions, and sitters within stare back at us, or out into the void. They are full of mystery and myth, and each work gives the impression that it contains a thousand stories to tell. The design of the pictures, their spatial arrangements, and figures within, create harmony both by and despite their disorder. His vision and pictorial arrangements are distinct and potent. Santore has had solo exhibitions at some of the following galleries and museums, the Yale University Art Gallery, Connecticut, the Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, the New York Studio School, New York, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Pennsylvania and the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona.

Santore lives and works in New York City, and has taught at the New York Studio School, Bard College,the School of Visual Arts and Parsons. He is represented by the Isabel Sullivan Gallery located in Tribeca, New York.