Norbert Kox
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Norbert H. Kox
"Contemporary religious painter Norbert Kox is one of America's most important Visionary artists. His self-described 'apocalyptic visual parables' utilize powerful symbolic metaphors aiming to shake modern man from his spiritual malaise and clear away centuries worth of mistranslations of the Bible." (Richard Metzger, Disinformation: The Interviews, p. 116). Norbert H. Kox, born 1945, has painted in oils since 1963 and acrylic with oil since 1975. His works have been exhibited internationally (United States, The Bahamas, Australia, Germany, and England) and have appeared in the New York Outsider Art Fair every year since 1994. He has participated in more than 75 juried group exhibitions, and over a dozen solo shows since 1989. In 1999, his solo exhibit To Hell and Back, at the Neville Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin, attracted national media attention with many television broadcasts. For a short time it became the "Top Story", and remained in the news for 3.5 months. It also became the topic of several radio talk shows and was protested and picketed by fanatics. By 2003, his works were exhibited in six of the eight shows at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore (since its opening in 1995). AVAM is number four on the list of the top 25 museums in America. His artworks and writings promote research into religious traditions and spiritual matters. Kox's Apocalyptic Visual Parables present a prophetic revelation, or apocalypse of the end times. They expose falsehoods and reveal facts, while denouncing idolatry and hypocrisy as sins of organized religion: much of modern Christianity has become the religion of Antichrist. Many of the works contain his own poetry and writings, along with Bible verses and Bible Codes (the "Torah Code") written within the work for reference. (www.kox.us). "Norbert Kox lives today as a semi-hermit...But he is not alone since God (and God's stark message) is ever present in his meditative prayer, in the "bible codes" he finds in a computerized grid of Hebrew letters, and in his lushly visionary paintings and gothic constructions. Increasingly famous and infamous now for his prophetic images that challenge mainstream religious pieties, Kox is a benign, humble, and intelligent man. Clearly at peace with himself, he does not, however, shy away from confronting us with God's apocalyptic warnings and encrypted revelations. But there are always flashes of light and spirit within the darkness - signs of hope and renewal...powerfully communicating God's most secret messages through his intensely glowing paintings (he has developed his own techniques of translucent acrylic glazing) and biblically haunted found-object assemblages. Despite the fear that his work sometimes engenders, he has had increasing national success as an artist with a provocatively disturbing vision of the end-time. Most recently, he has been retreating from the bitter Wisconsin winters to the tropical sun of Bimini, and it seems that he has tempered some of the harsh cartoon evil portrayed in many of the early paintings. But no matter how much his recent work shows an ameliorating principle, Kox quietly and passionately persists in his attempt to unveil the mysteries of God's strange missives to humankind." (Professor Norman J. Girardot: Curator, The End Is A New Beginning: Four Outsider Artists, 2000-2001, Zoellner Arts Center, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA). |
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