JOE FIG Contemplating Vermeer
NOVEMBER 17, 2024–APRIL 13, 2025
“I enjoy capturing the historical nature of exhibitions. They are up for a limited time and fleeting. My paintings allow me to share these moments with people who may not have the chance to experience them otherwise.”
—Joe Fig
For more than a decade, Joe Fig has been capturing the moment of encounter between viewer and artwork in his painting series Contemplation. Through small, meticulously detailed paintings, Fig depicts both the artworks and the people absorbed in them, drawing attention to how we connect with art in museums and galleries. He has chronicled numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally, registering the intimate
interactions between attentive beholders and the art in these shared spaces. Emulating the techniques and styles of artists ranging from Rembrandt to Yayoi Kusama and Barkley L. Hendricks, Fig reflects on our collective and individual transformative experiences of art. Fig distills what he sees, embodying a painter’s fascination with the act of looking— a contemplative process for Fig. His final compositions, painstakingly rendered in oil, capture this contemplation, both others’ and his own. Each work embodies what it means to be a painter and makes us ponder what art “does” when we engage with it attentively.
In his latest installment, Contemplating Vermeer, Fig turns his focus to the blockbuster Vermeer exhibition at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 2023. This landmark show brought together 28 of the 35 paintings attributed to the enigmatic Dutch master, an unprecedented gathering of Vermeer’s masterpieces from Europe and the United States. Drawing on his own visit to this historic exhibition, Fig created 16 new paintings in his signature style, with a keen eye for detail, offering meditations on Vermeer’s sublime work and the viewer’s experience. In these works, Fig not only
pays homage to the 17th-century painter’s legendary command of light, color, and verisimilitude, but also invites us to join him vicariously in the Rijksmuseum’s gallery spaces. We experience with him the fleeting yet profound moments of connection between people and these iconic works.
Why Vermeer?
Nicknamed the “Sphinx of Delft,” Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) is celebrated as one of the greatest Dutch painters, renowned for his intimate portrayals of domestic interiors, portraits of young women, and two tranquil cityscapes such as View of Delft featured in one of Fig’s works. Known for his meticulous brushwork, uncanny realism, and incomparable ability to arrest viewers’ attention with breathtaking tranquility, Vermeer, who died at the age of 43, produced a small oeuvre; 35 paintings have been attributed to him, each marked by carefully balanced compositions, harmonious colors, and extraordinary optical accuracy. His exacting naturalism reflects his close attention to the world around him, especially the subtle quality of light. His serene scenes, mostly set
in domestic interiors, often depict women engrossed in everyday activities like reading, writing, playing music, sewing—sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion. Their stillness lends a timeless quality and a sense of sublime perfection that set Vermeer apart from his contemporaries. His work has inspired artists, poets, musicians, novelists, and filmmakers and still mesmerizes viewers around the world.
Crafting Resonant Spaces: Fig’s Homage to Vermeer
Fig and the Rijksmuseum’s Vermeer exhibition seem destined for each other.
In his Contemplation series, Fig has captured contemplative atmospheres and quiet moments of reflection, paralleling Vermeer’s own practice. While the Dutch master painted intimate domestic scenes, Fig simply brings this spirit to our experience of art in public, shared spaces. Attentive to a spectrum of light effects and their impacts on his composition and palette, he incorporates realistic details and rich, lyrical color harmonies, favoring intense, saturated tones that heighten Vermeer’s own palette.
An accomplished painter, Fig constructs delicately balanced spaces where each figure contributes to a sense of depth, clarity, and rhythm. Across all 16 canvases, despite varied arrangements of figures and distances, we are consistently drawn toward Vermeer’s paintings, guided by the direction of viewers’ gaze. Although we may not always see viewers’ eyes, a slight tilt of the head, a particular posture, and their position in relation to the artwork suggest where their focus lies. Fig’s compositions are also anchored by a triangular arrangement, with the apex centering on or just above Vermeer’s painting, enhancing cohesion and focus within each scene.
Fig’s compositions, like Vermeer’s, are often asymmetrical, but retain a geometric organization that conveys harmony and order. In works like Milkmaid/ Rijksmuseum and Mistress and Maid/ Rijksmuseum, Fig’s skillful use of abruptly cropped figures in the foreground evokes both a spontaneous snapshot aesthetic and a palpable spatial depth, merging the viewer’s space with the painted scene. In the same way, Vermeer employed partially drawn silk and velvet curtains, open doors, cropped furniture, and
shadowy figures in the foreground to convey perspective and invite viewers into the scene with a heightened sense of immediacy. These techniques are evident in his works such as Officer and Laughing Girl (The Frick Collection, New York), Geographer (Städel Museum, Frankfurt), and Girl Reading a letter at an Open Window (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), all carefully selected by Fig.
In a sense, Fig is simply extending genre painting into our time when he pictures galleries and museum spaces peopled with contemplative viewers. He has captured those moments when visitors stood in reverence before Vermeer’s works, pausing to appreciate their quiet beauty and contemplative mood. Each painting in Fig’s series is an exquisite snapshot of contemplation made visible: the vibrancy of the gallery walls, the subtle shifts in light, the posture of museumgoers, and the intricate details of Vermeer’s artistry.
The Art of Observation and Artful Compositions
Though Fig’s paintings may resemble snapshots, they result from a layered artistic process involving numerous formal decisions.
He begins by studying individual artworks and the viewers who are deeply engrossed with them. He focuses on people’s body language, clothing (particularly colors and patterns), and proximity to the works and each other, as well as the specificities of the space. Fig photographs these moments as source material, then digitally reconfigures the images in his studio—selecting and repositioning figures, adjusting scale, combining different scenes, and fine-tuning lighting and color.
Fig’s paintings can seem to extend the space of the Vermeer exhibition, often reflecting the striking colors found in Vermeer’s works depicted in the background or echoing the tones of the gallery walls. In Milkmaid / Rijksmuseum, for example, the yellow blouse of Vermeer’s protagonist seems to reappear in the shirt of a man positioned centrally within Fig’s painting. Similarly, in The Procuress / Rijksmuseum, Vermeer’s procuress wears a yellow blouse that resonates with the creased yellow pants of a man in Fig’s foreground, while the rich black garments and hat of a male figure in Vermeer’s scene seem to spill over into the attire and shoes of engaged visitors in the middle ground of Fig’s work
Variation within Repetition
What stands out in this new series of paintings, Contemplating Vermeer, is Fig’s ability to navigate the constraints of the exhibition itself: the repetition of smallscale paintings, the limited wall colors, the subtle use of velvet curtains. Working within this framework and constraints, Fig needed to repeat and find the nuances and variations within repetitions. This results into a heightened sense of complexity, the constantly shifting interplay between the observant and the observed.
While planning out his compositions, Fig considered the constraints of working with a single exhibition of Vermeer and how it would create repetitive elements in his new paintings. Small-scale, intimate works appear repeatedly, overshadowed by the people standing in front of them; visual devices and themes in Vermeer’s work recur, and the same velvet curtains punctuate the same subdued wall colors, particularly shades of blue. Yet within this repetition, Fig uncovers and explores subtle nuances and variations. This approach to seriality deepens the complexity of the series, echoing Vermeer’s
genre paintings with their artistic constraints and refined variations and mirroring the Dutch master’s verisimilitude and precision.
The Art of Seeing: A Meditative Dialogue with Vermeer
Contemplating Vermeer both pays tribute to Vermeer’s genius and invites reflection on the act of looking itself. Fig’s work draws us into the role of the viewer, not only as spectator of his paintings in Sarasota Art Museum but alongside others standing in his painted world sharing in the quiet moments of contemplation and awe. At the same time, Fig prompts us to consider viewing as both introspective and physical, contemplative and generative—highlighting how our emotional and intellectual responses shape our experience of art. In doing so, Fig’s Contemplating Vermeer transcends mere documentation of a historical exhibition or homage to the Dutch master. It becomes a broader meditation on the interplay between art, viewer, and museum, revealing the museum as a secular sanctuary where beauty renews the spirit.
Fig’s artistic approach resonates with Vermeer’s legacy of contemplative painting.
Vermeer’s oeuvre, noted for its quiet and entrancing compositions, rewards close inspection—a quality Fig mirrors in his own work. By painting Vermeer’s masterpieces alongside the museumgoers who admire them, Fig emphasizes the widening circles of artistic engagement: Vermeer’s paintings encourage reflection, viewers pause to contemplate these paintings, Fig meditates on the viewers, the space, and Vermeer, and we, at Fig’s invitation, add our reflections. The result is a complex dialogue. Contemplating Vermeer offers to quiet our racing thoughts, transforming us into enchanted beholders in a moment in which viewing art becomes an artful act of its own. It is a passionate affirmation of the importance and relevance of painting, a tender observation of art and of people, and a joyful and mindful exercise in art appreciation.
This exhibition is organized by Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College of Art and Design, and curated by Rangsook Yoon, Ph.D., senior curator, Sarasota Art Museum.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from:
Judy and Fred Fiala
Charlotte and John Suhler
The Cowles Charitable Trust
Keith Monda and Veronica Brady
Janis and Hobart Swan
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