Joe Sorren was born in 1970 in Chicago and grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona. He began painting in 1989 and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Northern Arizona University in 1993. He then started working as a creative director for Transworld Snowboarding magazine. After an extended stay in New York, Sorren spent several years in Florence and Barcelona, where he absorbed both Italian and Spanish artistic influences.
Thanks to the poetry of his images, his characteristic soft-focus landscapes reminiscent of Impressionist masters, and his distinctive brushstrokes, Sorren quickly became one of the prominent figures in the American Pop Surrealism cultural avant-garde scene. A contemporary master of "emotion lighting," Joe Sorren paints in oil on large canvases, using a skillful technique capable of evoking the golden sunlight as it filters through the clouds of a summer storm. In his personal creative process, the artist allows his works to naturally and unconsciously evolve. It can take months, sometimes years, to complete a painting. Sorren creates his canvases with layers upon layers of color, infusing the texture with subtle nuances from which the creatures and scenarios emerge, captured from external emotions.
The joyful souls of Joe Sorren come to life through impressionistic brushstrokes, reflecting the artist's deepest imaginings. Sorren's inspiration stems from human behavior and collective experiences, which he transforms into endless fragments of crystallized time. In the artist's own words: "Since the painting is a physical document of the movement of time, the brushstrokes should not be unlike the grooves of a vinyl record, capturing not only the color and shape of a brushstroke, but the tone, energy, and emotion experienced in the time it was painted."
Layers of paint are added one after another, allowing a figure to spontaneously transform into a hill immersed in a landscape, or a tree to become a human-like creature. Sorren's large paintings are inhabited by mysterious creatures enclosed in an inaccessible ocean; they are absorbed in their melancholy, yet joyful in their exploration of the wonders of nature. Always playing with new colors and forms, Sorren highlights the tender faces and gestures of his characters, created in his distinctive fairy-tale style, and reproduces emotions like a sweet symphony emanating from our everyday gestures—a frame of happiness carved around the poetry of modern life.
Sorren's emotional themes are extraordinarily poignant and allow us to take a step back into the serene, unique, and timeless moments of our childhood.
His artworks have appeared in three monographic books and prestigious publications including "The New Yorker," "Time," and "Rolling Stone." He has also collaborated with Warner Bros, Fox, and NBC. Over the past 15 years, he has exhibited his works in solo shows in American and international galleries and museums. In 2010, Sorren was featured in exhibitions such as "Art from the New World" at Bristol City Museum, and "Pop Surrealism," held at the Museum of Visual Arts at Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, Italy, curated by the Dorothy Circus Gallery during the "Festival dei Due Mondi”.
