Joseph Glasco was born in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma and grew up in Texas. In 1949, after his first one-person exhibition in New York, Glasco became the youngest artist represented at that time in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
Glasco's rythmical, all-over abstract compositions have often been linked with those of American artist Jackson Pollock. During the 1950s, Glasco became friends with Pollock; the two seemed to share an affinity for the element of chance in their work. In the late 1970s, Glasco first created his collaged canvases such as "Untitled #7" . They were made from irregular scraps of canvas painted and glued unevenly onto an underlying abstract painting. According to Glasco, " . . . there is a need in me to do sculpture and it somehow comes out when I paint and use material on top of material, . . . which is what sculpture is about."
In this work, there is a dynamic play of contrasting warm/cool tones, evenly dispersed with no central focus. The trails of the paintbrush and the random shapes of color lead the eye in, out, and around this tightly woven network. The perception of this space changes dramatically as one experiences the work close up and, then, from a distance.
