Art

2027 Featured Artist

Joshua Bienko | Knoxville, TN

Joshua Bienko (b. New York, 1978) is an American contemporary artist whose work investigates longing, desire, perception, and the unstable relationship between looking and being seen. Working across painting, drawing, sound reproduction, fashion, and other interdisciplinary practices, Bienko renders subjects ranging from precious jewels and watch faces to tigers and human figures with extraordinary precision, often placing them within compressed, disorienting pictorial spaces. His work draws viewers toward images of striking visual seduction while quietly unsettling confidence in what can be seen, possessed, or understood. Time, attention, and looking become uneasy propositions; images shimmer and dazzle, holding desire and uncertainty in suspension.

Bienko’s work has been exhibited at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, Dallas Contemporary, Artpace, New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) New York, Labor Ebertplatz in Cologne, Vox Populi, and the Guggenheim Museum in conjunction with the YouTube Play Biennial. A recipient of a Tanne Foundation Award and residency fellowships from the Hambidge Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, he received his MFA from the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art and his BFA from the University at Buffalo. Bienko is an Associate Professor in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee and lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.

joshuabienko.com