Josh Dorman

American, 1966 - Present

Artist's website


Josh Dorman was born in Baltimore in 1966. He graduated from Skidmore College in 1988, then received his MFA from Queens College in 1992. Dorman's work has been exhibited in solo shows at galleries including 55 Mercer in New York City and Galerie Francoise in Baltimore, and in various group shows, most recently at The Drawing Center and The National Academy Museum.


His drawings and paintings have been reviewed in Modern Painters, Art in America, and The New Republic. He works in a studio in Long Island City, and has been granted residencies at Yaddo and the Millay Colony.


He has taught in and around New York, including Skidmore College, City University, and Rider University. He currently teaches at the Spence School in NYC, He lives in New York City.


"I want to know how the past lives in the present. When I use cut-outs from old books and maps, I’m aware that their meaning is from another time period, so that meaning, therefore, lives in an altered way in a contemporary context. What does this engraving of the gears of a cotton gin mean to us now? And what happens in our eyes and minds when it’s paired with the spiral forms from a diagram of the cell structure of the cotton plant? What does an 1890 map fragment mean in a world where we have GPS? These physical paper artifacts are folded into who we are now, yet we are forgetting our connection to them. I am constantly foraging for peculiar old books—like a hunter, or a botanist. I find disused knowledge in diagrams, charts, engravings, antique textbooks. Part of my goal is to make people see the value of old printed imagery, which depended for its existence on the filter of a human mind and hand, rather than on the camera lens.

By recontextualizing these antique images within drawn and painted worlds, I aim to generate paintings that feel dislocated in time. I generate fields of visual detritus, then bury and excavate, wander between flesh, feather, metal, bone, rock. Living ferns stain skeletal fractal forms on old maps. Gears, mushrooms, coronae, and cells mesh, echo, power machines or hover weightlessly. 

The worlds of form and image that I create have an internal logic, like a poem or novel. There are visual rhymes and dozens of narratives, but I do not prescribe a single reading. My aim is for the paintings to be simultaneously hyper-specific and completely open-ended."


Please find below the selections that are available for purchase through the John Raimondi Gallery.

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