Josh Keyes

Josh Keyes was born in 1969, in Tacoma, Washington. He was raised surrounded by forest and witnessed gradual their destroying by the grasp of industry, so it is no wonder that the environmentalist ideas grew on him. Keyes starts his career soon after graduation in 1992 at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and couple of years later at Yale University School of Art where he collected MFA in Painting and Printmaking. During the course of time, the work of Keyes’s has been exhibited in gallery spaces in London, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York and published in New American Painters.

Inspired by 18th-century aesthetics and philosophy, Josh Keyes paints animals in a style reminiscent of anatomical diagrams. His work is characterized by an attention to detail and to physiological accuracy. Keyes, however, does not place his animal subjects in their natural settings; rather, they are often in peril, displaced from their natural ecosystems into dioramic fantastical situations. These landscapes are frequently isolated and contain an incompatible mix of the natural and manmade. Keyes acknowledges that themes of migration and displacement frequently feature into his work as a form of his preoccupation with global climate change and the human impact on nature.