Joe Zucker

 was born in Chicago in 1941. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1962-1966) and now lives in East Hampton, New York. 

Throughout his life as an artist, Zucker has been fascinated by the materialism of painting and the combination of the (cartoon) world of pirates, three and four-masters, cannons, cannonballs and suchlike. This gives his work a high 'shiver me timbers' content and it seems to want to remain trapped in the fantasy world of his childhood. 

The materialism of painting is probably shown most clearly in his works where cotton balls are applied to the canvas, as well as in the recent scrolls, which are inspired by Chinese/Japanese models. On the one hand, a (visual) story unfolds, and on the other the view is obstructed, so that the image cannot be 'read' at a glance. The scrolls form the perfect medium for the background story or for the view that is usually presented in a panorama (Waterloo and Mesdag). They have every appearance of concerning a look inside, or in other words not being large-scale seascapes or distant horizons but rather the wrigglings that take place under a microscope lens.