In a 2014 interview in The Star, Joe Zucker discussed an installation at the Art Institute of Chicago that featured five of his paintings, all of them part of its permanent collection.
“They’re all very physical,” he said. “My paintings are objects, they’re not easel paintings, and I think the thing I was struck by is that even though the works in that gallery cover a period of more than 40 years, there’s an organization to them, so that every section is dependent on the next section. They’re devoid of arbitrary decisions.”
During the same interview, he used a freight train as a metaphor for his approach to making art. “Within each car there’s a different content, and at any time you can insert another car into the train.” He explained that while each of his series of works differs from every other in materials and style, his underlying approach is based on the same principles.
The result is a body of work as diverse as it is innovative and ambitious. Over the course of six decades, “Zucker’s work has ranged from personal to complex,” according to the Parrish Art Museum’s artist database, “often relating to the processes and materials used, whether that be testing the boundaries of rope, grids, or cotton balls.” His work is in the permanent collections of more than 40 museums worldwide.
Mr. Zucker died on May 15 at home in East Hampton. He was 82, and, according to his wife, Britta Le Va, he had experienced health problems since being injured in a car accident in 2022.
He was born in Chicago on May 21, 1941, to Irwin Zucker and the former Leah Pride. Raised there, he left to attend Miami University in Ohio, where he played basketball, before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There he earned a B.F.A. in 1964 and an M.F.A in 1966.
After teaching at the Minneapolis School of Art for two years, he moved to New York City. Within a year he was showing at the Bykert Gallery, a cutting-edge space run by Klaus Kertess that also exhibited work by Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Dorothea Rockburne.
“The gallery produced many important artists, so I transitioned right into a situation that was very much a dialogue about work, and if you had a show, there was a lot of feedback,” he told The Star. “Whether the feedback was good or bad, it felt like it meant something in the art community.”
From the beginning, Mr. Zucker followed his own path. “I didn’t work toward a style,” he said. “By that time I was a heretic, I no longer believed that feelings could be transferred from your soul to a canvas.”
Soon after moving to New York, Mr. Zucker began his “100-Foot-Long Piece.” Exhibited in the city in 1972 and at the Parrish Art Museum in 1992, more than 20 years after its creation, it encapsulates much of what his work is about. Indeed, it can be seen as a metaphor for decades of artistic production. It consists of some 30 vertical panels of slightly varying dimensions, each one using different materials, techniques, and stylistic strategies from those preceding and following.
The first section consists of a piece of wire mesh from which four rods topped with paper cones protrude. Other segments include images of Billy the Kid and the Charioteer of Delphi, photographic enlargements of fabrics, a charcoal drawing of the tombstone of the owner of a bar the artist frequented in Chicago, cotton balls soaked in red paint, lawn-chair webbing, and shelf paper.
The cotton balls would reappear often in Mr. Zucker’s work, perhaps most famously in a series that took as its subject the history of cotton production, including slavery, plantation life, and the invention of the cotton gin.
Over the years, in addition to the Bykert Gallery, Mr. Zucker exhibited with Holly Solomon, Paul Kasmin, Mary Boone, and others. He was in the important 1978 Whitney Museum exhibition “New Image Painting,” as well as in several of its biennials.
He was well established in the art world when he and Ms. Le Va moved from New York to East Hampton in 1982. The move was precipitated in part by the need for a larger workspace. “I realized I would have to pay handsomely for a bigger loft that would have the same water bugs, the same roaches, and the same rodents.”
Once on the East End, he spent many years volunteering as assistant basketball coach at Bridgehampton High School, and he appears in “Killer Bees,” a 2017 documentary about the team.
Robert Harms, a painter and close friend, said, “Just doing the Killer Bees — I was always in awe of that. He was able to make all that work and have those shows and devote so much time and energy to those kids. That was it for me.”
Of their friendship, Mr. Harms said, “During the dead of winter we would have these studio visits and they were some of the best studio visits I’ve ever had with another artist. And that’s not just hyperbole. We would sit and look at the work and talk. He was incredibly inventive, and he had endless knowledge. Both knowledge of art in general from the beginning to today, and also the world and living as an artist. He was a really good, sweet friend.”
In addition to Ms. Le Va, a brother, Charles Zucker, survives.
