Joshua Hogan - Contemporary, Abstract Painter

Joshua Hogan

Joshua Hogan was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He received his BA from Carlow College (now Carlow University). While at Carlow, he began a series of paintings inspired by his participation in the program, Semester at Sea. This journey to 15 countries, including Egypt, Vietnam, Turkey, and Morocco, laid the foundation for the fluid shapes he creates today.

There are three large windows in his art studio. As the sun rises, the trio admits the light caught in the morning air and the street scenes of Bloomfield. From his 3rd story studio, Hogan can watch passengers pass by below. He has a unique vantage point of the observed street. He can watch the web, or, the way and the wayfarers. The word “wayfarers” carries significance for Hogan. He calls the shapes in his paintings wayfarers because they model the meshwork of social life. We are both path and pedestrian, “way and wayfarer.” This truth of interconnectivity translates directly into his paintings. “The shapes in my paintings interact and communicate with each other. I intend for these shapes — my ‘wayfarers’ — to illuminate how every choice and action we make affect other people,” Hogan explains.

The artists who have most influenced him are ones who, as he says, “express the feeling of something, more than just paint on a surface.” These artists – Turner, Gorky, and Monet – have a soft presence in his paintings. In spite of these recognizable influences, Hogan’s aesthetic slips away from any single stylistic bracket. His paintings have relics from various movements – but, his reality is most akin to the Surrealists. Hogan’s shapes are a complex web of random exchanges that lie in the unconscious and its disruptive disconnection of signified relations. Hogan places the shapes he has gathered from around the world and creates a metaphor for the way that all things are related. His paintings invoke concealed connections; they tie together things that are unlikely and distant. As if you are flying over the 3rd story, or the rooftop, or higher, Hogan’s paintings show a vantage point where, when you look down, everything is rendered into incredible abstraction and we are all the delicate shapes that float together on an earthen background.

In 2001, Hogan opened BoxHeart Gallery in Pittsburgh's Bloomfield neighborhood and began exhibiting fellow emerging and mid-career artists whose artwork exemplifies the diversity and originality of contemporary art. Since then, he has exhibited hundreds of regional, national, and international artists while maintaining his own art studio. His paintings have shown nationally including exhibitions in the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Westmoreland Museum of Art, and Fallingwater’s Huntington Museum as well as internationally in the Love Art Fair in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His paintings have appeared in several film productions including Bloodlines (TV Series), The Perks of Being a Wall Flower (Feature Film), and Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl (Feature Film). His paintings were recently exhibited at The Affordable Art Fair in New York City, Superfine! Art Fair in Washington DC, Aqua Art Miami Beach, and LA Art Show.