Ministry -Josh Keyes – The Call I

Josh Keyes – The Call I

Josh Keyes was born in 1969 in Tacoma, Washington. He was raised surrounded by forests and saw them destroyed by the industrys. It’s no wonder environmental ideas came to him. Keyes began his career shortly after completing his studies in 1992 at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A few years later, he moved to Yale University School of Art, where he collected MFA in painting and graphic art. Over time, Keyes’ works were exhibited in gallery spaces in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York and published in New American Painters.

His work:

Although, Keyes’ works are critical, they include a true admiration for our planet. The strange and sometimes funny images are the result of careful observation. It seems that the artist tries to articulate the system and the complexity behind it, but not to beautify it. By portraying animals in different states, Keyes seeks to provoke a debate. He wants to address a more intense relationship between the biological and human worlds. This layer transfers the whole work from just art to activist practice.

The dark and fantastic stories of Josh Keyes are hyper-realistic and represent a kind of hybrid. They are based on references from art history as well as on trashy animal representations. This is an effect of his fascination with photorealistic painting and science fiction. He wants to leave reality and create a different world, which in the case of his art is somehow a mixture of reality and illusion. With a lot of irony, he made a social comment that practically sent us a warning of the present state. Josh Keyes – The Call I

As time passed, surreal compositions by Josh Keyes were added to various private collections and interest in his work grew. Although these works are naive in the painterly sense, they are the result of a precise and structured artistic practice based on a carefully thought-out plan to raise attention to the alarming, non-climatic changes. But they are social and political factors that threaten the existence of our planet and all the living beings that inhabit it.