Joseph Fiore began as an abstract painter, moving through several transitions in his life as an artist. This is reflected in this collection of work and includes abstractions as well as plein air imagery. About the landscape works, artist and critic, Fairfield Porter, wrote, “Fiore’s more or less abstract landscapes seem to express the oriental view that man’s value inheres in an equality to the other small parts of an immense whole…Fiore does not usually paint separate things – isn’t a valley, a storm, weather, light, a relationship?”
Moving in and out of landscape painting, mostly as a result of spending summers in Maine since the 1950’s, the artist felt that his abstractions derived from the “primal impulses” to be felt in the deepest working of nature and time. The landscapes led him to reflect upon the geometry of the universe; he firmly believed that both artist and scientist alike play a part in this geometry, which through careful study becomes a part of who they are. For him, the crossing back and forth from representation to abstraction nourished the two modes.
Joseph Fiore was born in Cleveland Ohio where his father was a founding member of the Cleveland Symphony. He served in World War II as an infantryman in Northern France. In 1946, Fiore enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina where he studied with Joesph Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky and Willem deKooning. Though painting was his primary concern, music was a strong secondary focus and Fiore studied the piano, sang in the school chorus and took musical composition from John Cage. He later joined the Black Mountain faculty and taught there from 1949- 1957. He went on to teach at the Philadelphia College of Art, the Maryland Institute of Design, the Parsons School of Design and the Artists for Environment Foundation. Fiore died in New York City in 2008.
